It didn’t take us long to start closing in on the Horsemen, apparently whatever information Morlo had wrung out of that cunt landlord was good. Our biggest delay came in pausing to ensure Vara was properly barricaded away inside the room, we couldn’t afford to divert attention making sure she and Gruin didn’t get murdered.

  Vara was not happy about this, mind, but Morlo agreed it had to be done, so she didn’t have much say in the matter. If nothing else it was nice to see his tendencies working in my favour for once.

  That was the only nice thing about this, though, because I had about ten minutes before we were marching into a den of violent, armed criminals. My breastplate suddenly felt a lot lighter and thinner.

  “You’re harder to kill than normal people, right?” I asked Morlo, abruptly realising that if a stray arrow or sling bullet put him down it would actually just end up being me in a fight with however many armed assailants. Morlo just grinned.

  “You stay in front and let me worry about myself,” he replied.

  We arrived in one of the shittiest city districts I’d ever seen or heard about, and wasted no time in venturing deeper. It didn’t take long for us to find our quarry.

  “Excuse me,” Morlo called out to a pack of men lurking on one end of an otherwise empty street, “is this the residence of the Horsemen?”

  “Yeah,” their apparent leader grunted, “what about it?”

  Morlo immediately killed the entire group with a thrown fireball, which detonated against the leader’s chest and sent the whole pack of them flying in every direction as a mass of severed, burning limbs. A second later I felt the heat of it wash over me on gushing winds that left me blinking back tears.

  The alarm sounded out from inside the building, and Morlo cackled. “Get ready for a fight, lad!”

  And I did.

  But despite my worry, I wasn’t really left to do much actual fighting. That tends to be how things play out when you have what is essentially a sentient cannon fighting on your own side, albeit in this case a great amount of my energy was expended on making sure the mad Thaumaturge didn’t blast me into as many pieces as he did everyone else.

  Morlo hadn’t brought me along for nothing though, soon enough the state of the building—an old workshop that seemed to have been abandoned before I was born—deteriorated enough that fiery collapse became a real danger. Which meant that he had to let up with the magic, and I had to start applying a more classic kind of violence.

  Two men at a time was about my limit, but the armour made it less risky to dance along that limit than I might usually have found it. More than once a clumsy blow bounced or scraped from breastplate and helm, giving me ample opportunity to punish the attackers with my own weapon.

  Eventually the flow of them tapered off, edged steel having a very particular way of deflating enthusiasm in any attacker. Morlo and I were left standing in a largely ruined, largely empty place surrounded by the dead and dying. The Thaumaturge took one look around, then nodded in satisfaction.

  “That’ll learn them,” he smiled, then started heading out. What, exactly, he expected people to learn from having their limbs blown off and being set on fire, I wasn’t exactly sure. People tended to struggle picking up lessons once their hearts stopped beating. But that was Morlo all over. More terrible than great.

  Not that I could talk, of course, I was as complicit in that as he was. At least I hadn’t killed any children, yet.

  “With that done, we can finally get onto your lessons,” Morlo said, cheerful as ever.

  “That’s all you have to say?” I asked him, actually disbelieving it myself. That someone as morally bankrupt as me found himself stunned by the display should tell you a lot.

  “They tried to take lives,” Morlo said evenly, “they borrowed the power of death from the universe, and the universe chose now to take it back. That is the way of things.”

  I was just stunned into silence, but Morlo didn’t leave it unbroken.

  “Now, back to your Thaumaturgical training. We can begin at last.”

  And so we did. I’ll skirt over most of the technical details, they’re not that interesting. The gist of it is basically like trying to go cross-eyed with your brain. If you’re having a hard time picturing that, good. It’s the best way I can convey what it feels like to actually try and learn Thaumaturgy from scratch.

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  The hardest part was the first part, the actual magic part. It was unlike anything else I’d ever tried, and I had no frame of reference for how to go about beginning it. My mind just wasn’t equipped to do so, I’d not picked up any insight over my life or seen anything comparable. With any new skill there’s usually some common ground between it and another you have; athletics all involve the use of balance or muscles, academia is about memorisation and reading. There’s tricks, techniques. Overlap.

  Not with Thaumaturgy.

  With Thaumaturgy it was best comparable to first learning how to walk, how to chew, how to speak. Problem there of course is that I didn’t remember how I learned any of that, nobody does, and so I was experiencing a unique order of frustration in suffering it now.

  By the time we were back at our rooms, I still hadn’t gotten the hang of it, and Morlo gave up on teaching me until I did.

  “Just keep practicing what I’ve taught you, at this point you just need to stumble onto the solution yourself. Shouldn’t take more than a few weeks.”

  Actually, it took most apprentices more than a month. I didn’t know that at the time, of course, and the idea of doing this for even a day was already horrible enough.

  What made it more horrible was Vara’s input. She began all helpful-sounding, nice and sweet, offering me assistance in as innocuous a tone as she might have. This was probably to avoid bruising my ego, but at the time I interpreted it as some deliberate slight, thought she was just being a shit and rubbing on my nerves deliberately. I was unpleasant like that, my fault and not hers.

  ++No, I really was being a shit. He was right the first time.++

  As irritating as I found her input, Vara’s advice was good. I paid uncommonly close attention to it, with no small measure of reluctance, and experimented with a few new methods she gently suggested. It still came as a surprise to me when I made actual progress.

  Not as much of a surprise as the form that progress took, though. Freezing one of my arms to the point of near-total numbness and sending a ball of fire to hurtle across the room and splash against a, fortunately stone, wall. I didn’t concern myself with the prospect of burning our new place down just yet though, far too busy screaming in agony at my flash-frozen limb.

  “The bath, in there now!” Vara snapped it out with some urgency, and even my shitty ego wasn’t dense enough to resist her advice over the pain. I stuffed my arm into the hot water and almost blacked out at the sensation of heat leaching into it unnaturally fast.

  It wasn’t exactly hypothermia, what I’d done, more localised than that. Having essentially dropped the temperature of my arm by several degrees in an instant, the flesh and blood started undergoing damage at the shock. Vara might well have saved my limb by having that tub of water prepared.

  Which didn’t make the saving any less agonizing.

  “You did well,” Vara told me, aiming to comfort me and distract from the pain perhaps. Nothing could’ve distracted from that pain. My arm felt like it was still freezing and on fire at once, and the skin burned where I was forced to hold the whole thing underwater to keep its heat soaking slowly into the meat. Right at the centre was where I was still cool, and that, of course, was where everything took the longest to reach.

  “Did you do this to yourself the first time?” I asked.

  Vara hesitated.

  “No,” she replied evenly, “but I had Morlo watching over me and spent a lot more time doing it. I paid more attention than you.”

  “Fuck off.”

  That frosted over her eyes again.

  “You’ll have chillblanes for the next few days, maybe weeks,” she told me stiffly. And I did.

  What I also had, was bigger concerns. Gruin remained thoroughly unconscious for the best part of a day and, when Morlo finally returned, he somewhat-reluctantly announced that I’d be given time to rest while I continued practicing Thaumaturgy too. That rest actually did me a lot of good.

  Partly it was because Morlo seemed to have some ability to heal people, too. Or at least, as he put it, help them heal themselves.

  “It’s all interactions of power, your body fixing itself, and when you’re a powerful enough Thaumaturge like me, you can speed up the interactions of that power. Slightly. This is literally thousands of times harder than other applications of Thaumaturgy regarding the same areas and mass, so I hope you’re grateful.”

  At the time, I wasn’t of course. Now I know more about Morlo, however, I’m even less so.

  Still, I can’t deny it was useful. I already healed quick—not that I knew why yet—and Morlo seemed to multiply the rate of that recovery fourfold. Within a day I felt my arm’s swelling go down and had a fair amount of mobility back. Gruin was still in a coma basically, but I was told that would be fixed soon enough too.

  Three days was all the break Morlo seemed willing to tolerate giving us, after that my first task was brought to bear. It wasn’t a nice one.

  “What do you mean recruiting?” I snapped at him, having been woken up from my nice, comfortable bed with the news.

  “Well, we’re going to be given a lot of work to do very soon if I’m not wrong,” Morlo told me, “so we need you to start looking out for a few men to follow you. A fellowship if you can imagine that.”

  “You mean build an army?”

  He shrugged. “If you prefer that word, sure. Though that’s in the future, for now I’ve found a simpler job you can pull off.”

  “A horrible fight that will probably get me killed, you mean?”

  Morlo sighed. “Oh stop whinging, you can’t become a Hero without a bit of risk.”

  “I’m not a Hero!” I snapped, “I’m just a..wanker with a sword!”

  “Best get practicing with it, then,” Morlo grinned, “because that sword’s about to go up against orcs.”

  Orcs. The word alone had me shivering like my arm had the other day. You might have a different impression of them now than I did back then, but let me tell you that growing up decades ago in an Anglysh country-town did nothing to inspire courage at the thought of facing orcs.

  “I don’t want to,” I snapped at Morlo, quite reasonably.

  “Well we don’t always get what we want,” he growled back, “have you been practicing your Thaumaturgy?”

  “Not enough for this,” I grumbled.

  “Then you’re lucky to be so bloody big, aren’t you?” he smiled. “Eat up, rest up, train up, because you’re setting out in a week.”

  Without another word, the Thaumaturge walked out of my room and left me alone. For the first time in a long time, I pondered the merits of fleeing through the window.

  I didn’t, of course. Rampant cowardice had kept me alive often enough, but it had its inevitable downsides as well.

  Explore more of our books — begin your journey here: