LITMIR.BIZ

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for young mages and rated them. The Prince was the most powerful mage in the Southern provinces and one of the ten most powerful in Aramaya. Having felt his power on the beach I could well believe this. If I managed to follow his moves properly, the two of us would be a formidable combination.

      Count Alexi came up leading a grubby looking man in a sheepskin coat who was rubbing the sleep from his eyes. The Prince questioned him in a language I had never heard before. I looked at Kitten inquiringly.

      "It's a southern dialect of peasant Aramayan," she whispered in my ear. The grubby man, who seemed to be a shepherd of some sort, was at first reluctant to answer any questions. However when the Prince threatened him with a mindsearch, he became suddenly co-operative and began to talk quickly and urgently. Finally he was taken away and tied up.

      "He doesn't know much about the necromancer, but he did know the layout of the manor. He says there are dangerous dogs that look like men. Sounds like blood beasts."

      By this time the two other boys had returned with news of the layout of the house and grounds. After we had examined this, the Prince called everyone around him and outlined his plan for them. As I expected there were disappointed looks all round, but surprisingly no one questioned the Prince's judgment or authority. What control he had over these lads! Kitten and the serving men were to stay behind the hill with the horses and the prisoner.

      "What will happen to the man?" I asked the Prince, as the rest of us scrambled up the hill keeping in cover.

      "Once we've arrested his master, we'll probably set him free. Serfs are not blamed for their master's sins in this country."

      What was a serf? Well, there was no time for these questions now for we were at the top of the hill.

      Below us was a small wooded valley with a little creek bubbling down the centre and further up the valley we could see the stone wall of the manor house with the tree tops of an overgrown garden behind it. The wall looked very new and very high. Usually there are people tending fields even this early in the morning, but there was no one in the neglected looking fields nearby. Prince Nikoli sent the others off around the back of the house. Then a few minutes later the two of us made our way up the gully and along the wall till we found a rough place to get over. Prince Nikoli, who was very tall, climbed the wall with remarkable nimbleness and helped me up after him. A tree branch and a stand of overgrown grey leaved bushes helped us to climb down the other side of the wall.

      The garden was full of gnarled old trees hung about with long strands of moss. The ground beneath was covered in shaggy bushes. It was a storybook scene from a tale of evil magic. As we crept through the undergrowth I caught a scent of sulfur and rot.

      "Demons!" I cried, just as two shapes came crashing out of the undergrowth to our right.

      Bloodbeasts - strong human bodies covered in hair and with the faces of vicious dogs. I threw out a bolt of power. There was a flash of light as the Prince did the same. We both hit the closest beast. With yelp and a stench of sulfur, a mass of burning fur thudded to the ground, just as the Prince dodged the claws of the other beast.

      "Look out," I shouted and thrust out a thud of power, which knocked the beast back through the air. The Prince threw another bolt of power which hit it mid-flight. For a moment it hung there in the air struggling and shrieking, its skin and hair crackling in the flame, before it too crashed to the ground. Blood-beasts are made of human flesh and the bones of a dog mixed with necromantic magic. Being magical creatures, they are very susceptible to magical attack.

      The Prince turned and shook my hand. "Well saved!" he said as if we were good fellows out shooting ducks together.

      "In future, you take the left and I'll take the right" I said.

      "Good idea. We'd better go. He knows we're here now."

      A few moments of stumbling brought us to the front of the house - a two-story building covered in ivy and graying white-wash and surrounded by a wide sagging verandah. I could clearly sense someone awake in that building - awake and using magic.

      Without hesitation, the Prince dashed towards the front door. I raced after him. He threw out a short blast of power and the door burst open. We plunged through into the front hallway.

      The Prince stopped short in the middle of the hall.

      "Keep watch," he said.

      He began muttering the words of a spell, a finding spell.

      "There's a mage upstairs to the left," I told him, to save time. I could feel the mage's strong magic with its edgy feeling of necromancy. It had to be someone pretty powerful for me to feel him so strongly. I thought nervously about those school boys waiting at the back wall. We must try and stop this person before he made a run for it.

      The Prince held up his three fingers on his hand while continuing with the focusing spell. Three. Did he mean there were three necromancers? Now I could feel a second person up there but... For a brief moment I felt a very weak trace of a third.

      Three? Three necromancers. God and Angels!

      Suddenly there was shouting and then a terrible shriek.

      Woomph!

      A huge fire ball come roaring down the stairs.

      I yelped and spread a protection spell all over the Prince and myself. Not a moment too soon. We were engulfed in a world of roaring flame.

      In the tiny peace inside the fireball the Prince opened his eyes. He grinned at me, lifted one eyebrow questioningly and pointed his finger up toward the ceiling.

      "Yes!" I cried, exhilarated by our strength and power. Together we lifted our hands above our heads and turning them to fists of stone leapt upwards out of the fire.

      Crash! The wooden ceiling and upper floor burst apart as we smashed up through it. The Prince disappeared in the clouds of rotting timber and swirling dust. There were several flashes of power. I leapt backwards out of the dust-cloud all senses at the ready just in time to see something like blue lightning disappear out of one of the windows.

      I darted towards the lightning, tripped over something lying on the floor and fell headlong. Scrambling up, I threw myself at the window. A ball of blue fire was shrieking away through the air. An inexpert fire ball exploded close by it. The boys! For a moment I thought of flinging myself after that blue fire, but to do so would draw me a long way away. A room-shaking blast from behind me made up my mind. The Prince was shooting blasts of power at a fresh-faced young man. The necromancer was defending himself and sending out bursts of fire, but not at the Prince. He was throwing fire all over the room - trying to burn the house down! That was reason enough for me to stop him. I thrust out my power and began extinguishing the flames as fast as I could go. It was not easy. The rotting wood walls and shabby tapestries caught fire easily and beneath us the fireball had turned the ground hallway into an inferno.

      Sometime during my frenzied extinguishing of the fire, the Prince must have bested the other mage for suddenly I found him working beside me.

      Shortly afterwards we stood together in the smoking hallway surveying the wreckage. Though it had been a tough fight we were smiling. Using magic is exhilarating.

      "Where's the mage?" I asked him.

      The smile left the Prince’s face.

      "When I bested him, he turned his power on himself. Poor young fool."

      The stairs were unusable so we jumped back up through the ceiling again. The floor in the upper room was sagging alarmingly and together we moved broken pieces of wood around to shore up the floor.

      Two charred bodies lay on the floor of that upper room. With a faint sense of revulsion I saw a foot print in the ashy flesh of one of them and realized that it must have been this that I fell over while racing to the window. I remembered the terrible scream that I had heard just as the fire ball had come rolling out of that upper doorway. It must have rolled right over him.

      "The way I interpret this scene is that these fellows have some evidence they wanted to hide," said the Prince. He was searching the bodies. "And they

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