Declan provided information on which units Ovir should ‘conscript,’ and Ovir, Gavin, and Declan visited the army base just north of Tel Mivar. It was a simple matter to move through the base, visiting those unit commanders they needed, and they were leaving one encampment for the next on their list when a group of about thirty men approached.
“What is the meaning of this?” the man leading the group said as he looked down on Gavin, Declan, and Ovir from atop his mount. “I have received word you claim to be conscripting units of the Army of Tel.”
“You hear correctly, sir,” Ovir said. “May I ask just who you are?”
“I am Derrin Cooper, General of the Army, and any such requisitions of troops must go through me.”
“You are wrong,” Gavin said, drawing the man’s attention. “Article 12 of the Constitution grants the Royal Priest of Tel the authority to conscript entire units of the army as necessary unless the Kingdom is in a state of war. I do not recall there being an active declaration of war.”
“Yes, well, I am the commanding officer of the Army; it is my-”
“Be silent,” Gavin said. “I do not like your voice, and I’m tired of hearing it. Ovir does not have to ask permission or pass any conscriptions through you. You know it, and I know it. Now, turn that nag around and go back from whence you came.”
A man two horses back from the general drew his sword, pointing it at Gavin as he said, “You had best get a civil tongue in your head; you address the General of the Army of Tel.”
Gavin spoke a Word, “Uhnrys,” and a tightening around his eyes was all the outward indication of the pain he felt as the invocation took hold. The general and his retinue seemed to freeze. They did not breathe; they did not blink.
“Gavin,” Ovir said, “what did you do?”
“I tested a Word I discovered in Marcus’s journals,” Gavin said. “Marcus wrote that it was almost a forbidden Word long ago, as it allows the arcanist to manipulate time itself to some degree. I can’t travel backward or forward in time-that I’m aware-but I can freeze time for myself or others. Right now, those men and those horses are in a frozen moment of time; tomorrow morning, the effect will dissipate, and we’ll be gone.”
Ovir and Declan stared at Gavin for several moments before they resumed their conscriptions.
Having gathered sufficient, trustworthy units from the Army of Tel, Gavin, Ovir, and Declan returned to Tel Mivar with the leadership of those units. They were going to meet with the Conclave and begin planning the assault on the mercenary camp.
The soldiers chatted with Ovir and Declan about the campaign, while Gavin rode ahead in silence. Even if Gavin hadn’t casually frozen some thirty people in time, the soldiers still would’ve given him a respectful distance. Black-robed arcanists were such an uncommon sight people would notice them, but a black-robed wizard of House Kirloth? Probably best for all concerned to give that man some space…
The Conclave meeting went well, and Gavin soon found himself stepping off the Grand Stair onto the floor where his suite awaited. All through the Conclave, a thought danced at the fringe of Gavin’s awareness. There was something about armies and formations that might help in the coming ‘campaign,’ as the soldiers put it, but Gavin couldn’t remember what it was. He did know where he’d read it, though: Mivar’s Histories.
Gavin entered his suite and went to the library, where he retrieved Volumes II and III of Mivar’s Histories; Gavin knew Volume I was little more than an examination of how the world reached the start of the Godswar. Pulling a chair back from the table, Gavin sat and began skimming through Volume II; Volume II ended with the Army of Valthon beginning the march to Arundel, the capital of the elf-lands in the Great Forest of the North.
Gavin set aside Volume II and began skimming Volume III, and he soon found what he sought. During the first battle on the march into the elf-lands, the Army of Valthon broke into separate formations to swarm the defenders at the Great Forest’s border, and to coordinate the battle, Kirloth and the Apprentices split up among the formations. Still little more than a slap-dash affair, none of the formations had their own identity or standards yet…so Kirloth and the Apprentices gave them one each. They created massive, glowing battle standards that hovered in the air high above the formation as they marched, and the core symbols of those standards were the glyphs of each wizard’s family.
Having found the object of his search, Gavin stopped skimming and read the entire section of Volume III that related to the first appearance of the battle standards. It was not uncommon for Mivar’s writing to digress into a treatise on whatever arcane feat dominated the moment, but nowhere did Mivar explain how they created the battle standards that Gavin could find. Gavin glared at the book and almost slammed his fist onto the table-top. Taking a deep breath, Gavin closed the third volume of Mivar’s Histories and pushed it away; besides, he still had one more place to search.
Gavin returned the two volumes to the library and walked across the common room to sit in Marcus’s chair. He used his medallion to open the chest beside the hearth. The chest was half-full of journals, and Gavin began lifting stacks of journals out of the chest and placing them upside-down on the floor in front of him. Twenty stacks of journals later, Gavin took the journal at the very bottom of the chest, left side, and opened it.
“‘It has been one hundred years since the death of Bellock Vanlon,’” Gavin said, reading the first line. “Damn. All those journals, and I’m only back about 500 years. This is going to take a while.”
Gavin closed the journal and leaned to place it back in the chest. As he did so, Gavin saw one of the boards in the ‘floor’ of the chest shift a bit. The board in question had a knothole, and Gavin tried hooking his smallest finger into it and lifting the board.
In the cavity under the chest’s main compartment, Gavin saw a drawstring bag made of heavy, off-white canvas. It was about the size of two men’s fists pressed together. Gavin retrieved the bag and opened it, pouring out its contents into his lap. There were almost fifteen small draw-string bags made of black velvet.
Gavin chose one and opened it, upending it over his hand. A smoky-white crystal fell into his palm. It was about the thickness of two men’s fingers together, and its sides were smooth. The instant he laid eyes on the crystal, Gavin knew what he had found, and he couldn’t keep from breaking into a huge grin.
“Well, well…these will certainly be useful,” Gavin said.
He returned the crystal to its velvet pouch and collected five more. The rest he returned to the canvas bag and placed the bag on the floor between the chair and the chest, before returning the board to the chest’s base and filling it once more with the journals in their original order.
Gavin spent the rest of the afternoon going through the six chests in Marcus’s room, and as it turned out, every one of them was packed to the brim with journals. At long last, Gavin found the object of his search in the sixth-and final-chest, about a quarter of the way up from the bottom. Gavin flipped through the journal and found that Marcus hadn’t just listed the Word he’d used to create the battle standards. Marcus had written out a complete diagram with annotations for each standard. Gavin grabbed a nearby journal and used it as a place-holder, before returning all the journals to their original position inside the chest.
Gavin stood with Ovir, Declan, his apprentices, and their parents about one hundred yards northwest of the Outskirts. The army stretched out in front of them, facing north and awaiting the order to march.