Ascendant

The reaction was immediate. The cook started bellowing in surprise and all six guards looked towards the stairs. Nym watched the man grab hold of a fireplace poker and try to flick the logs back into the hearth. While he was doing that, Nym used a cushion of air to push the contents of the stove onto the floor and stoked the fire inside with an influx of air. Flames started shooting up through the seams in the metal, causing the cook to yell again.

“The hell is going on up there?” one of the thugs asked.

Nym wasn’t good at controlling fire. He could make it spread, but he couldn’t stop it. He’d gotten some good advice and he’d practiced a bit, but compared to his skill with air or even water, he was laughably bad. For his purposes right now though, all he needed was to make it spread. So he did.

Fire raced across the floor and the yells became more panicked. Men from the common room abandoned their meals to rush into the kitchen and help try to put it out, but Nym fed the flames more arcana whenever it looked like they were about to be overwhelmed.

The guards were all looking at each other and muttering, trying to decide what to do. It was easy to hear the shouts and stomping around above their heads even from Nym’s position in the back corner. It looked like there was a short but harsh argument going on between them, which ended with one of the rune-protected ones saying, “Screw that. I’m not waiting for the damn ceiling to collapse.”

Then he left. Another one followed him after announcing, “She’s in a cage. It’s locked, she’s not going anywhere. I’ll be back once we get this taken care of.”

The distraction had worked, but only partially. Nym kept it up, hoping the pressure would force the rest to abandon the cellar. The fire kept spreading, urged on by his magic, and was now climbing up the walls and making its way into the common room. Most of the people had fled the building, though there were a stubborn few still trying to smother it.

One of the guards poked his head back down the stairs and said, “This place is going up. The fire… it’s not natural. We checked and that little mage Valgo was playing with is gone. We think he started it somehow. Come on, let’s go.”

“How the hell is that kid gone? His magic is supposed to be blocked! Did someone come rescue him?”

“I don’t know! Does it matter right now? You want to burn alive down here?”

“What about the girl?” another guard protested. “She’s worth a fortune. Valgo’ll kill us if we leave her here.”

“What are we supposed to do? You got a key?”

“Well, no.”

“Then it sounds like you can get the hell out of here while you can, or you can stay and burn with her. I’m going now before the fire blocks off the door.”

And with that, the man was gone and the remaining guards went with him. Nym’s distraction was a success. He just needed to get a now-terrified Analia out of the cage so they could make their own escape. She had kept quiet while the guards argued, but once they left, she climbed to her feet and started looking around.

Nym had to admire her for that. She wasn’t going to just sit there and die, but he didn’t know how she planned on getting out. She didn’t have his proficiency with telekinesis or with elemental air manipulation. Hopefully she knew some spells tailored to the situation.

Once he was sure all the guards had exited the hideout, at least all the ones who weren’t protected from his scrying, he moved out of the darkness. “Analia,” he whispered. “Can you get this door open?”

“What? No, of course not. How would I?”

“I don’t know. I thought maybe you knew a spell.”

“No, they got me with something when we were on that roof. I can barely hold a conduit open, and any arcana I try to draw in goes right out of my soul well and starts poisoning me.”

“Really? They stabbed me with something that knocked me out for a bit, but I feel fine now.”

She gave him a hard look through the bars. “Are you really bragging right now?”

“No! I’m just saying… maybe try again?”

“I’ve been trying, Nym! Even to save my own life, I can’t cast a thing. I’m surprised they didn’t do the same thing to you.”

“Okay, okay. This is fine. I’ll just go back to my original plan.”

Locks were complicated, but his scrying spell let him literally see inside them. Nym had never used magic to pick one before, but he was confident he could figure it out. He used telekinesis to move stuff around and kept trying to turn the mechanism holding it, but it resisted turning. Scowling, he played with the pins until he figured out where they all needed to be, and turned the lock.

“Hah!” he crowed as the door swung open. “Okay, next question. Do you know what they did with our money? We’re not getting a teleport without some funds and I couldn’t find it anywhere in their hideout.”

“Who cares about the money! We’ll get more,” Analia said, pushing her way past him.

“Unless you’re planning on going back home, I really doubt we’re going to replace it easily.”

“Nym! Worry about it later. This place is on fire. Do you not smell the smoke?”

“Well of course I know that,” he said. “I’m the one who lit it.”

“You… what? What if you couldn’t get the door open?” Her voice rose into a screech at the end.

“What did you want me to do? Ask them to go one-on-one with me until I’d knocked them all out. They’re twice my size!”

“As adorable as this bickering is, I’m going to have to insist that you put out the fires you started on my property,” Valgo said.

Nym jerked away from him where he’d appeared out of the darkness. Somehow, the thief had entered from the back half of the cellar. Nym knew for a fact that there were no hidden passages leading in. Valgo obviously knew some magic himself, but teleportation was third circle stuff. If Valgo was that good, they were completely screwed.

The thief took a threatening step forward and brandished the metal rod he’d jabbed Nym with earlier. “Let me be perfectly clear with you. The girl is a payday. Her father will drop a thousand crowns to get her back, and she’ll be returned unharmed. She has nothing to fear. You, on the other hand, have annoyed me greatly. I am trying to decide on the best way to proceed with you. My thoughts are as follows:

“First option. I kill you. You’ve cost me money and time and proven unwilling or unable to do the work I assigned you. Second option. I knock you out, again, and sell you to a group of Byramese flesh carvers who occasionally contact me needing new samples for their work. They would love to experiment on you since you seem to defy several standard laws of magic. Third option. You put out the fires and start cooperating with me. You’ll work for me until you’ve repaid the cost of all the damages, at which point I’ll determine your future.”

Nym just stared at the man while he ranted in an oddly precise and coherent manner. Then, once Valgo was done, Nym smacked him with a fully powered mind scrambler. At maximum strength, it was supposed to leave its victim dazed and confused for up to a minute, assuming they had no magic of their own. That obviously was not the case here, and Nym was just hoping it gave him fifteen seconds to get away.

“Come on, we’ve got to go,” he said as he scrambled for the stairs. Hopefully Analia would be right behind him, because they really did not have time to argue. Cinders were already falling from the ceiling as the floor over them started to burn through. The heat rolling down the stairs was awful, so much so that Nym harnessed the air just to push it away.

The fire covered the entire kitchen and smoke obscured his vision. Fortunately, his magic was still going strong. Nym pulled the air out of the room and the back door exploded open to belch thick smoke into the air. There were probably three dozen people there watching their hideout burn when Nym and Analia emerged into open air on cushions of air.

Most of them stared in shock at the pair, but before he could fly off, he was tackled by one of the guards with the anti-scrying outfit. Analia let out a huff of surprise as she hit the ground, only to be grabbed as well. Nym struggled to push the man away, but he was too heavy for telekinesis and picking him up with air cushions didn’t work so well when the target refused to let go of him. Sure, Nym could pick them both up at once, but that didn’t get him free.

He was about to lift all four of them into the air and try to bluff his way into convincing Valgo’s thugs into letting them go, but the old thief himself emerged from the shadows of the building. He took in the situation at a glance and started snapping out orders.

“Get the girl out of here. Gag her and bag her. No one can recognize who she is. You, grab the boy’s other arm before he tries to fly off.”

Valgo stalked forward with the metal rod. “I decided on the first option, kid. You’re too damn annoying to let you live.”

His arm flashed forward like a striking snake. Just before the tip stabbed into Nym, there was a deafening boom and the world went white.

* * *

Omarin went over the construct again while Nym’s face scrunched up in concentration. He repeated the weaving, only to have it unravel.

“Your intent is not clear enough. You are attempting to mix three different elemental properties, and they do not want to. You need to convince them, and you need to hold them apart until it is time for them to all collapse into one. It is not enough to mimic the final pattern. You must hold the framework just so.”

“The fire won’t listen to me!” Nym said. “Even by itself, it doesn’t want to. I can’t make it do what I want and control air and water at the same time.”

“You do not need to make the fire do what you want. You need to convince it that following the path you’ve laid out is what it wants,” Omarin told him.

“How do I do that? Fire’s not alive, and if it was, it would just do what I told it because it has to!”

“You tell it with your arcana, foolish child. You know this. You must bait the fire into following your will.”

Nym tried again, painfully, slowly reconstructing the framework for the spell. He wove in elemental air and water, framed in a matrix of his own arcana, his will given form, and carefully, so carefully, threaded gossamer strands of arcana through the construct. He ignited it with a wisp of fire, and in a flash it wound its way through the construct.

Nym pulled the supports away, and the whole construct collapsed onto itself. A boom rolled through the air and a burst of lightning arced away from him. Thirty feet away, a scorched path of earth five feet wide appeared.

“Not bad,” Omarin said, “but let’s work on your aim some more.”

“Yes sir. I’ll try again.”

“Good, now remember, lightning inherits from fire a desire to follow its own path, so you must create the path that it most wants to take in order to aim this spell properly.”

Nym’s face scrunched up again and he slowly started to rebuild the framework. He was a little bit faster this time, and faster again the time after.

* * *

Sight returned, and nine people lay dead around him. Their charred corpses were twisted and scorched, with smoke rolling off their limbs. Valgo was not one of them, but he was considerably charred himself and seemed to be unconscious.

“What was it that professor friend of Bardin’s said?” Nym mused out loud, his voice cold and hard. “Oh, right. ‘If you keep screwing around with your problems instead of taking care of them, you’re going to get struck by a bolt of lightning.’ I guess they were right about that.”