The Watcher's Disciple Read online

  The sorcerer continued, trying to talk down the situation. “We’re not trying to hurt anyone, the fire is only to be frightening. You’re a passenger, yes?”

  David nodded. That seemed safe—even if he had his tongue, he would have still nodded in response to a question that simple.

  “Then we have nothing against you,” The wizard said, voice slightly muffled and hard to hear behind their mask. “Leave us be, we’ll be gone in a moment.”

  David hesitated. He seemed so… genuine. Like he truly didn’t want to hurt David, nor anyone else. The other two bandits got back to work, cracking open boxes as the flames crackled around the train car, and for half a second he almost backed down.

  What are they stealing?

  The question popped into his mind, and once asked, he couldn’t set it aside. Boxes of luggage had been busted open without care or concern. Most of the train’s freight would be pedestrian. Clothing, a few small valuables, perhaps a little coinage, but if that wasn’t what the bandits were going for, then what else would they want?

  “Found it!” one of the bandits exclaimed, her voice clear in the confined space. The box she’d opened was full of opaque white blocks wrapped in thin paper, and it took David a couple seconds to realize that he was looking at a crate full of blasting jelly.

  His eyes widened at that realization. If these bandits got ahold of explosives like that, there was no telling what they would be able to do with it. That left no choice but to fight—he couldn’t back down and let them get away with that prize. David tensed, ready to leap forward and resume the melee.

  He wasn’t fast enough. The bandit wizard threw out a hand and yelled a word, hitting David with a clumsy wall of force. As a magical attack, it was weak, but David had no defense against it and went tumbling backward yet again. This time, his head struck something hard before he could slow his flight, and his landing was accompanied by blackness.

  Chapter 2

  I went out with my hunting party today. Six ships, almost two hundred sailors, twice again that many harpoons. With what trouble we’ve had lately, we weren’t about to let another one slip away.

  We took down the bloody beast, sure enough, but it put up a fight for the abandoned. One of our ships was all but lost, we had to tow it in. More men than I have fingers are hurt, but Watchers be praised, nobody killed this time. It’s a big one, too. Old. And I could swear the damned thing was looking at me when we finished it off.

  Gives me the chills, that.

  Journal entry, written by a sailor on a thulcut hunting ship

  “I’ll go,” Adelyn said, heart pounding in her chest. “Do you need a weapon?”

  She watched David as he shook his head and gestured to his hook. Confident he would be okay, Adelyn turned to run at a breakneck pace up the train car. The door handles were great iron wheels that had to be spun to unlatch, and she grabbed the first of many, turning it heavily and swinging it open.

  Running inside a moving object was not something she was used to, but she’d gotten her sea legs the day before when they’d boarded their first train. Now that she’d had a day of practice, she could manage it without falling flat on her face.

  If the train kept running, at least. They weren’t far out from the city, but that was assuming they weren’t on foot.

  Nobody cared to stop her moving between passenger cars. After opening the door she started at the wind whipping up outside, but after steeling herself she grabbed a handle, opened the next door, and kept moving.

  She wanted to conserve her strength, so she’d be ready to fight by the time she made it to the engine, but that would only serve her if she made it in time. If the bandits managed to stop the train before she arrived, her efforts would be fruitless. With this in mind, she ran at full speed, deciding to catch her breath at the final car if she had the time.

  Twenty four train cars was a long run. She could have run the distance flat in half a minute, but having to stop every fifteen feet to throw open a pair of doors before accelerating again added to the length of her flight significantly, throwing off her pace, and the shaking of the train car beneath her feet kept her run unsteady.

  Taking in a big gulp of breath, she reached the last passenger car. After that, it was one crew car, then the engine.

  The door to the crew car wasn’t locked, but as she seized the handle and tried to turn it, she found it stuck. Someone had jammed the other side. Putting her face up to the window, she could see two figures inside, and they were on the ground, blood staining their uniforms.

  Adelyn swore. She’d been too late to help them, though judging by the train’s continued movement, she wasn’t too late to save the engine.

  “Okay, gotta open this door,” Adelyn muttered, looking it up and down. The whole thing was solid steel, except for the glass window, two panes with air between them for insulation.

  Perfect.

  She raised her hand to the glass, feeling it out for a moment, then began to work her magic.

  Spirit slipped out of her and into one of the silver bracelets she wore—each had its own effect, but the one she chose was made to manipulate air.

  David had recommended runes to control wind, but she’d been adamant. She wanted something more versatile, something that could be used in situations besides combat. When they’d had the bracelets made, she’d had runes of air inscribed instead.

  “Fell gild,” Adelyn intoned, mentally picturing what she wanted to happen as she spoke the spell into existence, a whisper of spirit releasing from the bracelet.

  Between the two panes of glass, the air began expanding, swelling against the glass from inside. It was a tiny gap between the panes, and the air had nowhere to go, so the pressure built.

  Adelyn stepped back and, a second later, the glass shattered. She could have punched through it with a strong enough spell, but the trick with the air had conserved her strength and broken the glass clean, leaving few shards sticking in the door. Sticking her arm through the gap, she felt around for the handle and found that a crowbar had been wedged in place to keep it from turning.

  Grasping it in one hand, she pulled the crowbar free, then tried again to turn the handle from her side. It spun open.

  Running into the crew car, she knelt by the first of the two people in uniform. A young man, barely older than her, his blue vest stained so much with blood that it looked black. She put her finger to his wrist, but felt nothing.

  Biting down on her lip, she checked on the next employee, a woman a couple years older. She had a gunshot in her belly, and when Adelyn moved to check her pulse, she moved.

  “Lords!” Adelyn started, jumping backwards in shock. Once she overcame the surprise, she leaned back in. “Are you okay?”

  “P-peachy,” the woman stammered, shaking her head. “Just taking a nap on… on the job. Don’t tell my boss.”

  Adelyn gave a light chuckle, then pulled up the woman’s shirt to look at the wound. “Did the bullet come out the other side?”

  The woman shook her head, and for a moment Adelyn was relieved, then she said, “Can’t feel much below my belly. Dunno.”

  Adelyn looked down at her. She was in rough shape, and Adelyn’s knowledge of healing magic was rudimentary at best—she only knew the generic word for healing.

  A part of her considered that this was all pointless if she didn’t stop the bandits. That was priority, not this one woman.

  Abandon that. I’m helping her.

  “I’m going to cauterize this,” Adelyn said. It was the best help she could offer. “Okay?”

  The woman nodded, face pale. In fact, all of her was pale, the color in her had bled out onto the floor.

  Adelyn drug her fingers through the blood, feeling the spirit there. The blood wasn’t fresh and much of the power in it had leached away, but it was still enough for her to charge the second bracelet on her wrist, the one carved with runes of heat and light.

  With a word, the air in her hand grew to searing temperatures,
a ball of coalesced heat that would burn anything on contact.

  Manipulating the air, she put her hand over the bloody wound, wrinkling her nose as the smell of burning flesh and iron filled the air as the blood sizzled. The woman’s back arched in pain and she groaned, but within moments the wound had sealed, skin and muscle blackened to a char.

  “Roll over,” Adelyn said. When the woman shook her head in protest, Adelyn took her by the side with her free hand and rolled her forcefully, looking to see an exit wound obscured by sticky blood.

  Repeating the cauterization, Adelyn let the woman lie back. It was no great surgical procedure, but it would hopefully keep her from bleeding out.

  “Stay here,” Adelyn instructed, feeling foolish. She didn’t know what advice would be good. Should she sit up? Try to stay awake? Sleep?

  Whatever the answer, Adelyn didn’t know it. Taking what scraps of energy remained in the blood, she left the woman whimpering in pain and stood to go find whoever’d done this and pay them back in kind.

  She peered through the glass slit that stood between her and the engine. In stark contrast to the rest of the train, which was steel and iron, the engine was built from bronze and brass wherever possible. It ran on spirit, and so steel would have trebled the energy cost as it sapped away available power.

  Rather than simply having a door going inside, the engine’s entrance was on the side, with a narrow metal grate to walk on. There was a handrail, but it was the only thing to protect from the wind whipping around the train car.

  Three people were standing on that narrow grate, wearing riding leathers, bright bandanas, and hats over their heads to make them indistinguishable. One was working at the engine’s door with a crowbar, trying to pry off the handle, while the other two seemed to argue with wild arm gestures, each holding their own crowbars ready. The bronze door was standing well against their struggle, but they seemed to be making some level of headway.

  Throwing open the door in front of her, Adelyn poured energy into the third bracelet around her wrist—the one for force. She didn’t bother with subtlety. Throwing out her hand like a slap, she called, “Shtap!”, and struck one of the bandits across the face with force.

  The bandit was thrown backwards, clutching the bronze rail for support as Adelyn jumped the space between her car and the engine, so that she was on the same narrow metal grate as the bandits.

  One of the bandits yelled something ineloquent and anatomically improbable as they saw her, stepping back and clutching for a weapon.

  Adelyn couldn’t help but smile at that, as she poured power into the rune of air. The wind was dangerous, it would make it possible for any one lucky shot to throw her from the train, so she stopped it. With a few words and an outpouring of power, she froze the air around them, making the wind still—or, rather, creating a barrier of air that would resist the wind for a few moments.

  The bandits tried to gather against her, but they couldn’t bring their numbers to bear, and were forced to fight her one at a time. Adelyn drew her father’s cavalry saber, the ripples in the metal shimmering as she blocked an attack by the first, kicked hard, and sent them stumbling back into the second as they managed to recover from her initial magical slap.

  She poured spirit into the runes of heat around her wrist, trying to precisely work magic while fighting the pair of bandits—the third was still working at the engine’s door while they fought. Her focus was distracted by the crowbars swinging at her head, but she did her best, mumbling magic words beneath her breath.

  As the bandits took turns parrying her away, she let one catch her in the left arm, intentionally taking the blow so that it would draw blood. It was her bad arm, anyways, and she needed the extra power. Her magic was consuming spirit too fast for her to sustain on physical strength alone, so she used the spirit in the blood as a supplement, filling the heat runes again and again, not caring how much of the power was sapped away as she worked the magic.

  Seeing the hit as an indication of success, the bandit who’d struck cheered, moving in more aggressively. Adelyn was forced back a few steps and forced to sidestep into the bronze rail, making it shake and tremble.

  She could parry and defend well enough, but she was no master. Though she was armed with a well-crafted blade and they had only a steel rod with a sharp bit at the end, it was still a fight she wouldn’t be able to easily win on skill at arms alone.

  One hard blow nearly knocked the blade from her grip, and she felt a bit of wind graze against the gash on her arm. She threw a quick spell of force at the nearest bandit to distract them for a moment, dropped to the ground, grabbed the grate with both hands to brace herself, and kicked as hard as she could at the bronze rail that kept the four of them from falling to the ground.

  Though she was strong, she didn’t have the power to kick down solid bronze bars. That was why she’d been working her spells, channeling heat through the runes and focusing it as close to the base of the rail as she could, heating each bar to the point of losing its strength.

  As she kicked at the base of the rail, the hot bronze sheared, coming away from the train, and in the same moment, her spell protecting against the wind broke apart. Gales of wind suddenly rushed back against the side of the train, staggering the trio of bandits. They tried to catch themselves against the rail, but the rail was now tumbling on the ground below.

  Two bandits fell from the train, hitting the dirt and rolling in heaps. Adelyn neither knew nor cared if they were okay, though she assumed they were not. A fall from that height at that speed was not something to be walked off.

  The third bandit only stood by virtue of clutching to the door they’d been trying to pry open. Adelyn staggered to her feet, leaning against the train so that she wouldn’t come to the same fate as the bandits, facing off with the last one.

  The bandit gripped the door with one arm, holding out the crowbar, shouting something that Adelyn couldn’t make out over the wind. Before she could stop the gales a second time, though, the door swung in from behind the bandit and they were pulled backwards, yelping in surprise.

  They might have managed to catch their feet, but before the bandit could try, a large bronze wrench smashed into their head, sending them spinning to the floor. Adelyn looked to see the conductor, an aging man with a healthy beard, holding the tool.

  He dropped the crowbar and waved at her, a gesture saying to come in, and Adelyn rushed through the doorway, getting out of the wind.

  “There’s more out on horseback.” He kicked the downed bandit for good measure, then looked at her. “Stay on your guard.”

  “Do you know what they’re after?” Adelyn asked.

  The conductor shook his head. “Local trouble, likely. I just keep the engine running.”

  “I’ll fight them off,” Adelyn said, walking to the front of the train, where narrow windows let her look out and see a handful of bandits still keeping pace on their horses. Checking back through the window of the door, she saw that more had peeled off to help their fallen friends.

  “You’re a peace officer?” the conductor asked, watching her.

  Adelyn shook her head, finally giving herself a moment to relax now that she was sure there was no immediate danger. “A helper.”

  Standing back, she looked around the engine room. Two great brass teardrops hung from the ceiling, rocking slightly as the train rolled. Those would be the batteries, storing spirit for the train to run. Cables ran from there to a large engine block, which would turn the wheels outside.

  “How good are you with all that magic?” the engineer asked.

  “Good enough to fight off some bandits,” Adelyn said, chewing her lip. “Why?”

  The engineer hesitated. “‘Cause they were saying if I didn’t open the door, they’d go get their sorcerer and have him open it for them.”

  Adelyn tensed, first in alarm, then in fear. She couldn’t fight another sorcerer, not of they had significant experience.

  Another thought made he
r alarm grow. If they didn’t have their sorcerer at the engine, that meant—

  “David,” She said, running to the door. If he fought a sorcerer, he was almost as certain as she to lose.

  Skirting the unprotected walkway, she began her flight back down the train. Her legs were sore, her body was tired from all the running, but she carried herself faster than she had coming up the train to begin with.

  The doors moved with frustrating slowness, creaking as she threw one open, crossed between cars, and threw another. She sucked in air to keep herself going, wishing she hadn’t been so careless in the fight—she’d been cocky, wasted spirit on something flashy when she should have been more conservative.

  She passed by the guard who’d given them trouble before, into the cargo compartments, past two more train employees who were busy putting out a fire that had spread on the ground. She shouted an explanation at those two and hoped that they wouldn’t try to stop her, sprinting to the next car.

  Hitting a door that was blocked, she didn’t go for any fancy tricks with air pressure, simply slamming through the window with a wave of power, stuck her arm inside, and threw open the door.

  The car’s walls were on fire, and smoke was billowing in through windows that had shattered from heat. She saw no bandits, only a body on the ground, limp and lifeless, blood oozing from a wound on his leg.

  “David!” she cried, running to his limp form. Rolling him over, she shook him, trying to elicit a response.

  “Uh?” David mumbled, eyes blurry as he came to. Seeing her, he started, looking around the train car wildly.

  “We have to get out of here,” Adelyn said, pulling him up. His leg could support him, but he walked with a pronounced limp, and seemed too weak to hold his whole weight. He accepted her support only grudgingly, perhaps embarrassed to need her help to walk.

  As they stumbled, he had to stop to gag and retch, overcome with nausea from the effort to limp away. He panted, waiting until he was sure he wouldn’t throw up before he straightened and held out trembling hands so that he could sign, ‘Did they get away?’