Book 8: Chapter 50: Landfall
Sailing downriver, Martel fended off an assault of questions from the passengers. “We will make it to Archen,” he promised. “We simply have to journey overland a few days longer than expected.” As much as he hated this himself, he hid such emotions; trying to calm the people down and make them accept the new situation was difficult enough. It was tempting to simply intimidate them into silence, but these were people meant to populate his city, and so Martel repressed his natural inclinations and remained calm, using every drop of patience he possessed.
“Indulge my curiosity. If those Khivans had refused to answer you, would you really have sunk their boat?” Maximilian asked when the settlers had finally dispersed to grumble among themselves.
Martel was unsure himself, but he knew what to answer. “Don’t make threats unless you are willing to follow through.”
“Perhaps that is a Nordmark I can respect,” Maximilian remarked with the contour of a smile. “You may get the chance yet. They are watching us,” he continued. “On the shore.” The mageknight pointed left towards the east. Martel followed with his eyes to see Khivan soldiers stalking through the reeds and growths.
“Let them. We’ll land on the western shore, Asterian territory. Nothing they can do about that. Captain!” Martel called out. “Up ahead. Prepare to make landfall.”
“With them Khivans watching us?” The old sailor looked nervously to the east. “We’ve barely made it away from those damnable cannons. Look, I’ll sail you to Esmouth. They can’t complain that we make berth in our own town. You can disembark there.”
That would easily take them fifteen days to march up along the shore, especially as they would be going through marshlands. “Not acceptable. We land here,” Martel declared.
“This is my ship!”
“And the moment we disembark, all danger is gone, and you can return to Morcaster. The Khivans have no interest in you nor desire to attack an Asterian ship. You will let us leave,” Martel suggested, weaving magic into his words.
The captain made grumbling sounds and demurred, but finally, he relented. “Prepare to make landfall!” Within the last hours of daylight, the ship dropped anchor and began loading its longboat to ferry people and goods ashore. “I better lend an empowered hand,” Maximilian jested and got into the boat, grabbing the oars to row. Staying on the ship, Martel watched the Khivan shore. The activity on the ship became mirrored across the river.
He had assumed it was a small patrol, five soldiers or so. But as more and more Khivans appeared on the shoreline, it looked more like twenty to thirty. Even worse, all of them were armed with muskets.
With a sense of dread, Martel saw them unsling their weapons and line them up. To the last moment, he could not believe they would actually shoot. Yet suddenly, the crackle of musket fire pierced the air, as did numerous bullets. Martel felt them like streaks of heat, aimed at the shoreline, and he used his elemental counterspell to push them back.
He succeeded, though it took more out of him than he had expected. The projectiles were small and scattered across a wide area, making it hard for him to intercept.
“I knew it!” roared the captain. “Raise the anchor! We’re leaving now!”
“Steady your nerves, man!” Martel shouted back. “They don’t dare shoot upon the ship! They’re firing at the people ashore. This ship will stay until we are done, or I will sink it myself!” he declared, glancing at the sailors, who froze their movements.
“Don’t threaten me!” yelled the captain, agitated enough to storm up and deliver his message into the battlemage’s face.
“And don’t interrupt me when I’m defending us all!” Martel retorted, pushing the man back. He turned back to the shoreline where the Khivans had prepared another volley. As before, his elemental counterspell raised the wind to push the bullets back, and they fell harmlessly into the river.
Martel tried to measure the gap between him and his enemies. He could perhaps land a lightning bolt to roast them, but the distance made it uncertain, and he would have wasted a lot of spellpower if it failed. At the same time, he had to react. Already, the Khivans were dispersing down the river to shoot over a wider area, and they had given up on volleys to instead fire individually .
Deciding to change the situation entirely, Martel jumped over the railing of the ship. His feet landed on solid ice, on which he used magic to push towards the other shore, approaching the Khivans.
Seeing a mage in full armour sail towards them on floating ice, the musketmen shouted and all turned their weapons on him. Some fired immediately while others drew their pistols, which Martel knew the meaning of. He reacted first, releasing a gale of such strength, it pushed them all back to land on the ground.
Reaching out with his magic, he sensed the hot barrels of every musket that had already fired and crumbled the iron to ruin them. Dealing with the unfired pistols was harder; the Martel of the war would not have been able to in this manner, but the battlemage turned sage reached out to sense the powder stored in each of them, which he ignited with enough power to make the weapons explode.
Dumbfounded, the Khivans stared at their destroyed weapons and the mage who, like a cannon made flesh, had dismantled their group yet left them all alive.
Martel had been tempted to let an inferno blaze over the shoreline and boil them all alive, but the release of so much power at once might have left him exhausted; and if matters with Khiva had not yet reached a state of war, avoiding escalation mattered. With a contemptuous look at the musketmen, Martel pushed his sheet of ice back towards the ship and climbed up the rope ladder.
The captain and his crew stared in awe or fear at the mage. Rumours were one thing; watching the magic of the Firebrand at work another.
“Nordmark, last boat!” Maximilian yelled across the ship. “Get in – unless you prefer to float again?”
“Goodbye, captain,” Martel mumbled, grabbing his staff and belongings to follow the mageknight down the other side of the vessel. Once in the boat, he allowed himself to calm down, releasing the tension in his body. On the shore, he saw his people, frightened but unharmed. They had lost some days, but nothing else. And unless the Khivans had shown unusual cunning and lied to him earlier, Archen was yet to be under attack.
“Quite a display,” Maximilian admitted. “I am beginning to think all those tales about you are less exaggerated than they seem.”
Too worn to muster a reply, Martel leaned back in the boat.