209 — Book 5, Chapter 1 — Kidnapped, Pt 1

Cale Cadwell Cobbs did not, as a general rule, enjoy tournaments.

He might have put in a great deal of effort so that he and his apprentices could join this one, and he certainly had a great deal of respect for the mages they would be fighting with, but a tournament was just such a lackluster way to bask in the true capabilities of magic! What happened to collaborative magics? Sure, it was difficult to determine a victor with something like a collaborative ritual, but one could always rank each individual school's contribution to the ritual, then narrow it down from...

Hmm. That was a tournament again, wasn't it? Maybe this whole Fettered Divinity thing would be different. He could give it a chance, he supposed. The fact that a support team was required at all suggested that at the very least it wasn't the traditional set of duels and magical competitions. Perhaps there would be a nice game of minion chess, some competitive dungeon delving, and a baking ritual or two. One could only hope.

Then again, all this pre-tournament drama suggested it wasn't that far off from the traditional tournament after all. Not as far as competitive cheaters went, anyway. Apparently, the tournament being a sacred ritual didn't stop some academies from hiring ruffians to do their dirty work.

Cale was tied up again, which he found mildly annoying. That would have been his first complaint if not for the fact that he'd technically consented to it, this time, at least insofar as allowing his would-be kidnappers to tie him up counted as consent. He hadn't verbally consented, so his kidnappers still sucked as people, but he was internally relatively pleased with his situation.

Well, sort of. He was seriously starting to consider fighting back, but that was because his kidnappers had put him in a rucksack, of all things. It was both uncomfortable and starting to chafe against his skin. Really, if they were going to tie him up and carry him about, they could've at least done him the dignity of putting him in the arms of someone nice and strong. With good muscles, preferably. Gender didn't matter as much.

...Thorn had put far too many ideas into his head. Bah.

After a moment's thought, Cale began shuffling around in the sack, pulling at the calcite cuffs around his wrists. His kidnappers were no doubt expecting him to put up some struggle; if he remained still the entire time, they might start to suspect he wasn't as trapped as they thought. Besides, if they knew he was awake, they might actually give him some entertainment.

"Methinks the human's awake," the voice Cale mentally dubbed as Brute muttered. He felt the sack being swung around so Brute could peer closely at it, though he was pretty sure the guy couldn't actually see him. "How's you feelin'? You can't get through those cuffs, can you?"

Cale tugged at them again experimentally. "Nope," he said. "Seems like they're magically reinforced."

"That's right," Brute said, sounding entirely too proud of himself for something that Cale was pretty certain hadn't been his idea. "Bet you thought you'd just break 'em, aye? But we knew! This here rock's too brittle, we says. So we went and got it fixed up, and now a puny human like you ain't got a chance in the eight hells of breaking it."

"Seven," Cale said automatically. "Also, hells? That's an outdated term, you know."

"...What's you mean, seven?" Cale could hear the frown in Brute's voice. "There's eight hells. Me mum told me."

"There were eight infernal realms," Cale said. "There are seven now. I blew up the eighth one."

"Ain't no human's blown up one of da hells," Brute said with a snort. "You think we's stupid? You's the one in a sack, with your mana all sealed up 'cause of a rock!"

"I guess you're right about that," Cale said absently. He hadn't anticipated they'd find a calcite mage just to shape some specialized cuffs for him; it made this whole thing a little more annoying than it should have been. Why couldn't they have used collars, like all the other morally bankrupt kidnappers? He would've been fine with a calcite collar. Cuffs meant he couldn't scratch his head properly, and the itch was distracting.

"You ain't sound scared," Brute said suspiciously. Cale felt him lifting the sack so he could inspect it. "Why ain't you sound scared? You got a trick up your sleeve or somethin'?"

"I forgot how," Cale said. "I'm a great mage, remember? Haven't been scared for centuries. No idea how it works."

"Oh." Strangely enough, Brute sounded not only like he'd bought the excuse but like he was rather contrite about it. "Uh, sorry ta hear."

"Why's that?" Cale asked, now intrigued.

"It's 'cause he likes them horror tales!" another voice—Cale dubbed this one Cackle, because something about his voice made it sound like he was constantly cackling—cut in. "Can't get enough of 'em! Bastard won't even sleep if one o' us don't tell him somethin' proper scary—"

"Oi, don't just go telling 'im that!" Brute growled. Cale felt himself suddenly being swung about, followed by a yelp as Cackle leapt out of the way; he grunted as he felt the dull impact of the sack being flung against the sand.

"Don't just swing 'im around, you dumb brute!" There was a distinct thunk as Cackle smacked Brute over the back of the head. "What if you break the cuffs? Do you want a pissed off god-mage on our hands?"

"Not a god," Cale said, though his voice was somewhat muffled by the sack being pressed against the sand. His barrier gave him enough of a buffer that it didn't make it difficult for him to breathe, fortunately. The first time he suffocated to death because he hadn't thought to include that buffer had been embarrassing.

"Also, these cuffs are basically unbreakable. You enchanted them, remember? And I'm not pissed in the slightest." Cale paused. "I'd probably just grant you a blessing for freeing me and then leave."

"Don't listen to 'im," Cackle said sternly. "He's just sayin' that so we let 'im go."

"But what if he does give us one of them blessings?" Brute argued. He picked up the sack again, this time a lot more carefully, though he still slung the whole thing over his shoulder. Cale sighed. One of these days, he would be kidnapped by someone that would carry him properly. "We ain't gots no blessings. We ain't even gots a good handle on the Gift! But if we gots a blessing—"

"Ach, don't let 'im fill yer head with nonsense," Cackle said. "We'd hafta learn, and them academies ain't no place for people like us. Can you see yerself readin' a book? Or throwin' fireballs?"

"I could read a book," Brute grumbled, though now he sounded a touch despondent. "I just gotta learn them letters. Yous ain't special for knowing them."

"I ain't," Cackle agreed. "But them academies ain't gonna teach you letters. There ain't no class for letter-learnin'."

Well, he was right about that, but Cale knew for a fact that there were spells for that, and Brightscale had accommodations for people who struggled to learn to read. He wondered if he should interrupt, but this seemed like something of a private moment.

"Aye, I knows," Brute said with a heavy sigh. "Thanks for readin' me all them stories."

"We're gonna get ya some new books with the gold we get from this," Cackle promised. "And the gold's life-changing anyway! We don't gotta risk this blessing when we ain't need ta take on jobs like these no matter after, yeah?"

"Aye," Brute agreed again, this time sounding a little more enthusiastic. "You's gonna help me pick out them books?"

"'Course I will," Cackle assured him. "Ain't a thing in the world that's gonna stop me. Now, you ain't gonna free our prisoner there, are ya?"

"I won't," Brute promised. "Sorry, uh—Kel? But we needs the money from this job."

"Hm?" Cale blinked. Oh, right, he was their prisoner. Supposedly. "Oh, the name's Cale, not Kel. And don't worry, no hard feelings. If I break free from your employer I'm not gonna hunt you down or anything."

There was a long pause.

"...Is you going to break free after we gives you to them?" Brute asked, sounding a little worried now.

"He ain't gonna break free," Cackle said. "I seen their setup. They got a whole cage made out of that rock what seals his mana. And without his mana, he's jus' a human, remember? And you, human! Stop scarin' 'im!"

"I thought he liked being scared," Cale pointed out, holding back a laugh.

"This don't count," Cackle said. "Yer just tryin' to get into our heads."

"I promise you, I am not," Cale said, grinning to himself. Oh, this was so much more interesting than he'd expected it to be. It would be one thing if he'd been kidnapped by run-of-the-mill evil bandits, but these ones were remarkably interesting. Maybe he could find a way to help them; he was starting to feel a little bad that they would never see that payout. "I'm just participating in the conversation. I'm stuck in a sack, you know. There's not much else to do."

He could practically feel Cackle squinting at him through the sack. "...S'ppose you got a point," he said reluctantly. "Uh. On the off chance that ya do break free. Thanks in advance fer not holdin' a grudge against us."

"You're quite welcome," Cale said cheerfully. "So, do you mind telling me where we're headed? I mean, I'm all powerless in this sack anyway, so..."

There was a brief, uncertain pause, and then a gruff sigh from Cackle. "How about it, boss?" he asked. "Think we can tell 'im?"

A grunt. "Don't care what you do," a new voice muttered. "Just leave me out of it."

Cale was delighted. There was a third kidnapper! This one had a rough, gravelly voice, and didn't seem to like to talk at all; he had spoken only when prompted. He was also their boss, apparently? Cale had thought that was Cackle, but apparently not.

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Cale decided to refer to this one as Bert. Because it was funny, mostly. Besides, descriptive names only worked so many times.

"C'mon, boss," Cackle said, quieter now, a touch of concern slipping into his voice. "Ya been quiet since we got the job. You ain't got cold feet, do ya?"

"No." Bert's voice was sharp. "But the job's dangerous. Wouldn't have taken it if we'd had any other choice. Since we did, I have to keep a lookout."

"Dangerous?" Brute asked, uncertain now. He shifted the sack he was carrying, the movement uneasy. "But... that stone we got seals him, don'ts it? Why's we gotta worry abouts danger?"

"Not him we have to worry about," Bert said. "We stole one of Brightscale's prized mages. They're going to come after us."

"But they ain't gonna find us," Cackle said loudly, though he said it loudly enough that it sounded like he was trying to convince himself of the fact. "We got the thing! They gave us the thing for it."

"That's right," Brute said. He didn't sound like he actually knew what Cackle was talking about. "We gots the thing, Gravs!"

Well, there went the idea of calling him Bert. Apparently his name was Gravs. There was a slight, annoyed pause, and then Brute spoke again, sounding ashamed. "I weren't s'pposed to say your name, was I? Sorry."

"You were not, but it's fine. And yes, we have the artifact," Gravs said tiredly. "They claimed it would hide us. But what have I said about trusting the word of a mage?"

There was something bitter in the way he'd said the word mage, more like a curse than a descriptor. Cale took careful note of that, frowning to himself.

"We ain't trustin' them, Gravs," Cackle said quietly. "But we got him, didn't we? We caught the Void Sage, or whatever he's called. That's gotta mean the arty-fact is working."

"Maybe." Gravs's voice was terse; he didn't sound convinced. There was a distant rumble of thunder, and Cale wondered if they were getting close to the Petrified Forest. "Look, tell him what you want. I need to make sure we're safe. I'm not losing either of you on this job."

Well, one way or another, Cale decided that he rather liked Gravs. There were worse types of people to be kidnapped by.

"You heard the boss," Cackle said, giving the sack a rough pat. Cale considered saying something about not just patting it like that, but decided it wasn't worth the inevitable confusion. "We're takin' you to a dead drop or somethin' like that. We ain't really know who hired us neither, but we're s'pposed ta just put you there, then wait fer the gold to come in. There's this hole in Forbidden Magic Spider Territory we're gonna put you in."

"Just... a hole?" Cale asked, blinking.

"Yup," Cackle said proudly. There was another rumble of thunder, this time somewhat closer. "Jus' a hole! All top secret stuff. Never had ta do a dead drop before. Why's they call it a dead drop, anyway? You don't gotta be dead for it. They were real specific about that, they were. Told us ta make sure you were alive when we dropped ya into the hole."

"It's not cause the hole will kills him, is it?" Brute asked, anxious now. "I don't think I wants to kill someone for this."

"No, no, it ain't gonna kill him," Cackle said, though he sounded uncertain. "I think. Uh, hey, Gravs, this hole ain't gonna kill this guy, is it?"

"No," Gravs said, raising his voice to speak over the rumbling crash of noise that rolled over them. Cale remembered the bright flashes of petrifying lightning that constantly struck the Petrified Forest. He'd watched them from a distance, not all that long ago. "Even if it would, we wouldn't have much of a choice. Trust me on this, we don't want to piss off our employers."

Cale thought about this for a bit. Something about what he was hearing was bothering him. Why was Gravs so afraid of these employers, exactly? They couldn't have contacted him directly, which meant Gravs was just afraid of either their name or their magic, and he was more afraid of them than of whatever reputation Cale had acquired as the Void Sage...

Hm. And now that he thought about it, these bandits had just said this would be their last job, hadn't they? They'd done it right within earshot of him, too. The Thread of Fate he held was active again, and if it had arranged things in such a manner than that meant—

"You know, I think you might've already pissed them off," Cale said. "You didn't happen to have a deadline, did you?"

Alarm shot through Gravs, and Cale could hear in his voice that he had snapped into high alert. "How did you know that?" he growled, stalking toward Cale.

"Well," Cale said. "For one thing, that thing we've been hearing isn't thunder."

He heard a sharp intake of breath from Gravs as he whirled around. He really needed to learn what their names were at some point. That sort of thing tended to improve their odds of survival, thanks to the Thread, and he'd decided that he rather liked all of them. Kidnapping aside, of course.

And if he was right about that thunder...

There were twin cries of terror from Brute and Cackle, and then a snarl from Gravs. Yep, there it was, then.

"Run, now!" Gravs shouted. "I'll hold it off!"

Cale felt a surge of mana as Gravs desperately manifested a barrier. A surprisingly sturdy barrier, in fact, for someone who had some kind of chip in his shoulder about magic. He poured every scrap of mana he had to spare into that barrier until it shone with a silver-white light visible even through the thick material of the sack Cale was being held in.

There was another rumble, this time right next to them, and Gravs cried out as something struck his barrier. That one hit had drained nearly half his mana, based on the state of his core, and he had fallen onto one knee just trying to maintain it.

"Run, you idiots!" Gravs repeated, panting. "What are you doing?!"

"We're not—" Cackle swallowed. "We're not gonna leave you, boss."

"Yeah," Brute said, though Cale could feel the way he was shaking through the sack. "Yous took care of us! We's not gonna leave you."

"'Sides, running ain't gonna help us with that thing, is it?" Cackle chuckled nervously. "May as well stay here behind this shiny ol' barrier you've got. Speaking of which, I didn't know you could do that, boss. Think it'll hold up?"

Gravs didn't answer the question, which was perhaps answer enough, and from the silence that ensued, they all knew it.

Cale could only imagine what they were feeling. He'd assumed, at first, that the thunder he kept hearing was just the lightning of the Petrified Forest, which bordered one corner of Brightscale Academy's territory.

But if that were the case, then the thunder should have been constant. Besides, Forbidden Magic Spider Territory was nowhere near the Petrified Forest. Combine that with the way the thunder closed in on them and the peculiar way in which it echoed, and there was only one creature that could be hunting them.

A balewyrm. Summoned from the third infernal realm and set loose on these poor bandits, no doubt. They were terrifying creatures, especially to mages that didn't have the training required to understand what they were or subvert their magic. An adult balewyrm could tower easily over a forest canopy, and their "heads" split into thousands of noodle-like strands, each one capable of firing tiny pinpricks of magic that could paralyze and poison their victims.

The thunder was the sound of its hunting. A thousand tiny spells blazing through the air created a sort of internal resonance, it turned out, and that internal resonance sounded very much like thunder. The balewyrm would have been hunting down prey while it was approaching them—they were energy-intensive creatures and needed to sustain themselves by constantly feeding, after all.

The good news was that balewyrms attacked slowly. They encircled their prey with their many, many heads, then struck with their magic all at once. Gravs have some time to recover, though even then, he wouldn't last forever.

Cale suspected that the summoner had never actually intended for these bandits to drop him off. The deadline was more likely a ruse, made intentionally impossible for them to meet so there was some justification for punishing the bandits. That would be why they had hired this group of bandits, too, instead of more reputable mercenaries; their summoner must have needed people that wouldn't be missed and wouldn't recognize that the artifact they'd been given was designed to fail.

In other words, this was an assassination attempt disguised as a kidnapping attempt. How fun! He'd missed this sort of thing. His reputation tended to make most people reconsider before they even tried. He was going to have to thank Akkau later; the calcite thing had been a brilliant idea on his part.

"Well, if we're all out of options, you could consider freeing me," Cale suggested. "I'm sure I could deal with whatever the problem is."

"Can't," Gravs said roughly. "Would if I could. Those cuffs are enchanted, and I can't dispel the damn things. But..."

The bandit let out a heavy sigh, and Cale perked up as someone took the sack from Brute and roughly pulled open the ropes tying it shut. Gravs reached in and grabbed him by the arms, pulling him out, then steadied him when the cuffs threatened to make him lose his balance.

Now he could finally take a good look at his kidnappers. Brute was exactly how Cale had imagined him—a thick, heavyset man built with layers of muscle. Cackle was lean and scrawny, no doubt made for squeezing through tight spaces, and Gravs was somewhere between the two, with a nicely muscled build that didn't make him too large to fit through a door.

"I am sorry we got you into this," Gravs said, clasping one of Cale's hands and looking him in the eyes. "We shouldn't have taken on the job."

"Oh, it's fine," Cale said, smiling and giving Gravs's hand a good shake. Gravs seemed terribly confused by the act. "You're all henchborn, then?"

"Yous really did forgets how to be scared," Brute said sadly. The enormous man looked at him with mournful—well, eyes was the wrong word for it, but what passed for his face did crease together in a way that conveyed a great deal of pity.

That was the thing when it came to henchborn. Their species were the result of a tyrant mage trying to create the perfect minion—quite a lot of species were a direct result of that sort of magical engineering, in fact.

It hadn't worked, of course. Such projects always went awry. But it was the reason they looked the way they did. The mage that created them hadn't wanted them to be identifiable or to be people, and so he had created them as loose archetypes, with not even a face to call their own. They had purple, magically synthetic skin and could shape themselves to vaguely resemble other species, but never with a face; a mouth was the most they could do, and they had to split their flesh apart to do it.

Cale supposed that this explained the bitterness in Gravs's voice when he'd mentioned a mage.

"I's sorry you won't get the chance to remember," Brute added, misinterpreting Cale's expression for one of sadness and acceptance.

"Oh, it's fine, really," Cale said, giving Brute a pat on the shoulder. He had to do it with both his hands, since they were still cuffed together, and it was really more of a pat on the elbow. Brute was huge. "Don't worry about it."

"Boss was right about this job," Cackle muttered, shaking his head. "I'm sorry too, fer my part in all this. Gave ya a good smack on the head, I did."

Well, technically Cackle had just hit his barrier, and he'd pretended to fall over unconscious. For reasons Cale had no intention of elaborating on, he was very good at pretending to fall over unconscious. "Don't worry about that, either," he said, grinning. "Do you know how many people have wanted to hit me like that? I'm sure they'll love seeing it on their scrying orbs."

The balewyrm was gathering mana again for its second blast, and this time Cale could see the effect of it. It was no wonder these bandits had been so terrified. The act of it gathering mana for its spells seemed to leech all color from the world, gathering it into a thousand tiny mouths that surrounded them like a deadly halo.

Gravs gritted his teeth, pouring more of his mana into his barrier. "Might be it, boys," he said, his voice strained. "It was a pleasure knowing you all."

A thousand spells fired from the balewyrm and blazed against the barrier. Gravs buckled as he strained to keep it active, but though each spell was tiny, they pushed and pushed against his defenses.

Any longer and Gravs would undoubtedly begin to suffer the effects of draining his mana core like this. There was a sharp crack as its internal structure began to fall apart—

—and then the barrier flexed, and each of the balewyrm's thousand spells bounced backward, striking it in each of its thousand heads. It collapsed instantly, struck near-dead by a thousand simultaneous paralysis spells.

[Imbue Reflection] has grown to level 15!

"Holy hells, boss, I didn't know you could do that!" Cackle gaped in awe, staring around them. "Why'd you let us think we were gonna die?"

"I don't... I didn't know I could do that, either," Gravs muttered, stunned. He stared down at his own hands, then at the collapsed balewyrm around them.

"Maybe you's unlocked a special skill," Brute offered. "It's in the books, it is! I reads about it sometimes."

"The Gift rewards effort," Cale agreed, maneuvering so he could give Gravs a pat on the shoulder. The cuffs made the gesture awkward, but Gravs probably got the point. "You've probably got a notification or something, right?"

"It... it says I learned [Imbue Reflection]," Gravs said, a note of wonder in his voice.

"There we go." Cale grinned at him. "Mystery solved! Now, you have a hole to deliver me to, don't you? We have a schedule to keep! Clearly this employer of yours doesn't like delays, so we should probably keep going."