spent no little time wondering why the dark elves didn’t just pasture their livestock in the middle of the fungus- crops and save all the back-and-forth. Failing to come up with an answer, he turned his attention back to the puzzle of his failing spells, muttering nonsense and making odd gestures as he worked alongside the rest of the field- slaves.
Finally, a month or so after the wool-shearing, Jack found his break.
He was toiling to reinforce the fieldstone paddock-fence by the castle road with fresh stones, when a team of trolls pulling a heavily laden wagon up the road got their vehicle stuck. The dull-witted creatures broke the wagon’s axle trying to work it loose, infuriating the dark elf wizard overseeing them. “Stupid oafs!” the mage shrieked. “I will teach you to be more careful.”
With a single swift syllable and a subtle motion of his left hand, the wizard expertly conjured a whip of emerald fire to lash the clumsy trolls … and Jack realized that he could dimly sense the subtle strands of magic that shaped the spell.
As the hulking monsters yammered in pain and fright, Jack quickly ducked back down behind the stone fence. “Something has changed,” he murmured. He hadn’t been able to sense any sort of magic since he’d awoken from his slumber in the mythal stone, except when he was brought back to the stone’s locale to tell Dresimil and her brothers stories of Myrkyssa Jelan. Then he’d felt a faint whisper of something in the mythal stone itself, most likely as a result of the powerful enchantments the dark elves were using to restore the device. Now it seemed that he could glimpse magic at work, even when he was quite a distance from the stone. But why now?
Crouching by the wall as the trolls fled back down the road, pursued by the wrathful dark elf, Jack thought carefully. Then it came to him, a recollection of a conversation long ago. “Yu Wei,” he said aloud. Long ago, Jelan’s Shou wizard had told him that his magic was a manifestation of the wild mythal’s power. Perhaps, as the dark elves repaired their ancient mythal, they unknowingly restored something of Jack’s own knack for magic. After tendays and tendays of captivity, the repairs had proceeded to a point that finally returned him some small capacity to sense magic-and perhaps work it.
Jack glanced about, then repeated the same arcane gestures and words he’d been trying for tendays. It took a half-dozen tries, changing the somatic motions and trying out different mental approaches, but then suddenly he felt the subtle sensation of magical energy rippling and responding to his touch.
Quickly he pressed on with one of the most basic spells he knew, a simple cantrip of minor telekinesis. Magic hummed softly in his mind, answering his call. He crooked his right hand and raised it, and at his gesture a large rothe patty twenty feet away quivered and rose into the air. Jack motioned with growing confidence, and the patty bobbed up and down in his telekinetic grasp before he flung it into the air with one final wave of his hand.
“Now I am getting somewhere,” Jack said to himself. He glanced around to make sure no one was paying attention to him and ducked down to hide among the rothe as he continued his experiments. He attempted another spell-a spell of teleportation, designed to let him step through the dimensions and reappear hundreds of feet away in the blink of an eye. He’d always found that to be a useful talent, especially when it came to evading capture … but this time the subtle energies refused to acknowledge his command. Jack scowled in frustration, repeating the experiment, but still his dimension-step spell eluded him. Perhaps he wasn’t getting along quite as well as he’d thought.
Did the mythal fluctuate in some way? he wondered. If his powers were indeed born in its magic, the manipulations of the drow might conceivably affect his ability to wield magic. Or had he simply met the limits of his arcane talents in this Weave-less day? At the height of his former confidence and skill, a minor teleportation was about the most difficult spell he could perform. Jack scowled, wondering exactly how many spells remained of the repertoire he assumed to be at his fingertips. Why, he might be no more skillful than a clumsy apprentice, fumbling to strike a small light or levitate a rothe patty a few feet in the air! “An unacceptable outcome to months of trial and error,” he muttered blackly.
“Where is that shirking fool of a human?”
Jack looked over the backs of the nearby rothe and spied Malmor striding in his direction, glaring furiously from side to side. The bugbear fumed and swore, but he hadn’t quite caught sight of Jack yet. The last thing in the world that Jack wanted was for the fat bugbear to find him avoiding work and playing at magic; he ducked back down again and tried one more familiar spell. This time the magic responded to his words and gestures; just as Malmor swaggered into his paddock, scattering the rothe, Jack completed a spell of invisibility and vanished from sight.
Malmor peered about the enclosure, muttering under his breath, then turned and stomped back in the direction of his filthy hut by the feed bins and silos. There would be several overseers and more trustworthy slaves working there; no doubt the bugbear meant to round up a search party and comb the fields until he found Jack. That was the usual procedure when Jack was trying not to be found. The rogue took the opportunity to quietly slip past the restless rothe and hurry two paddocks over, exulting in his momentary ability to avoid whatever unpleasant task the bugbear had in mind.
Jack was just beginning to consider his next move when he felt his invisibility spell fray and fade. He definitely did not possess the skill he’d enjoyed back in the days before his unfortunate encounter with the mythal stone … but he had at least a little magic, and that would be enough. Jack flickered back into visibility, startling the nearby rothe. He laughed aloud, a laugh that was a little uneven around the edges. A pair of goblins working nearby stopped and stared at him over their shovels as he reappeared, perhaps wondering if his sanity had snapped altogether. “Of course I am mad!” Jack called to them. “Mad with genius, my malodorous green colleagues! Oh, much will now be set right, you will see!” He gave them a conspiratorial wink before he ran off toward the granaries and stockades closer to the castle.
Hiding between two shearing-sheds, Jack took a moment to work out his spell of disguise. This one was simple enough, and now that he had the knack of it, the subtle strands of magic fairly hummed in his mind’s grasp. Threads of illusion shimmered around him as he crafted a new appearance, a bigger, fatter, hairier appearance. A crooked fang protruded over his lip; his ears grew long and pointy; his arms lengthened while his legs shortened, giving him a rolling, bandy-legged posture. In ideal circumstances he would have performed his magic in front of a mirror, correcting minor details as he noticed them, but no such facilities were at hand. In thirty heartbeats he judged he was done, and emerged from his hidden corner with a wide-bellied swagger.
Instantly he found himself confronted by the field overseer Two-Tusks, a bald orc with a severe underbite. The orc grunted in surprise.
“What are you doing, you shirking mongrel, you mongrel shirker?” Jack demanded in his best imitation of Malmor’s voice. “I should put you back in the paddocks, the paddocks.”
Two-Tusks cringed and stammered, “The human rat is not at his place, Malmor! The goblins told me he ran off this way. They said he went mad. I go to find him.”
“He is not here!” Jack growled. “Now you listen: Go to the south gate and open it. Drive all the rothe out of the paddocks. No more rothe in the paddocks, turn them out, turn them out.”
Two-Tusks stood and gaped. “But then the rothe will all get out.”
“Of course!” Jack bellowed. “Why would I tell you to open the gate if I did not want the rothe to get out? The drow want the beasts to graze free for a time, so Malmor must let them out. Now do what I say at once, at once!”
The orc turned and fled the scene, dashing off toward the south. Jack could hear him shouting orders to other slaves, lashing about with his stinging-rod as he yanked them away from their current tasks and drove them toward the assignment Jack had given him. Jack grinned to himself, then swaggered off toward the next overseer to catch his eye, the gaunt gnoll Karshk. The unpleasant creature was hurrying across the pasture to put a stop to whatever Two-Tusks was up to. “Karshk!” Jack bellowed, stopping the gnoll in his tracks. “Go at once to the west pasture and drive out all the rothe. Now is the time they are to graze free. Quickly, quickly!”
The gnoll stifled a yip of surprise. “But Malmor-r-r, we’ll never-r-r catch them all once they get fr-r-ee,” Karshk protested.
“They must have exercise, exercise. So the drow command. Who are we to argue with what our dark masters desire? Who are we, who are we?” He raised his hairy hand as if to backhand the gnoll, but Karshk scampered off westward, heading for the next pasture over.
Jack surveyed his handiwork for a moment, enjoying the spectacle of bleating rothe running in circles before field hands frantically shouting and waving, trying to drive the stupid creatures out the open gates. Next he swaggered his way to the pastures on the far side of the tower, browbeating and threatening every field-slave and
