40. A NEW PLAN

  “The Grinder is...” Bend trailed off for a moment. “He is… the one who controls everything. Uof is the de facto leader, but The Grinder runs the factories, he controls the flow of information, he manages how the weapons are crafted, which spells are cast in the Factory. When he was interrogating me in the prison—"

  “Wait, Ruath interrogated you personally?” I asked, shocked.

  “Yes,” he replied. “Ruath takes in every mage captured, and he washes their minds personally. He does it alone and then he… well... he extracts spells from every mage. His goal isn’t simply power and control in Vale. He wants spells, to increase his own knowledge. He wants to be the most powerful mage in the world. He monopolizes information.”

  This was new information to me, but the focus around Vale was shifting, and things were becoming clearer.

  Ruath was a mage himself, though extracting spells from each and every mage was a brutal perversion of The Way. Deeper and deeper ironies continued to arise. Ruath had twisted the code of the Way, encouraging mages to share one spell with one another in greeting—a sign of trust and friendship—using a similar idea to amass his own power.

  I mulled this over for a moment.

  “What spells did you give him?” I asked.

  Bend nodded, a strange gleam in his eyes. “I didn’t know much then,” he said. “I still don't know much. But I gave him a Fire-starting Spell, another spell to track animals. Nothing spectacular actually. He wasn’t too pleased with that.”

  Dirk stood and put his hand on Bend’s shoulders, and I could sense emotion passing between them without any words exchanged.

  “How can we trust you now, son?” he said quietly.

  “I can’t trust myself anymore,” Bend whispered, his hands on his head.

  “Maybe one of our mages can heal the damage to his mind,” I said.

  Dirk nodded. “One of the Factory mages studied the art of healing before he was captured. He even had the healing tattoo.”

  “Get him,” I said. “Bend, we’re going to try to cleanse your mind from whatever Ruath did, okay?”

  He didn’t respond. A few moments later, Dirk reappeared.

  Keven entered the room following him, the Factory mage looking ragged and tired. I hadn’t seen him in the most recent battle, though he was the one who had helped me in my own recovery after we attacked in Vale the day before. We nodded to one another.

  Then Keven stood before Bend, who still sat on the bed.

  “Do you want to know what’s wrong with him?” Dirk said.

  Keven shook his head, “No, I will see.”

  He put his hands to Bend’s temples, closed his eyes, and held Bend’s head loosely. Bend kept his eyes open, but after several moments, they widened slightly and he leaned back. Something had happened. Keven looked up at us, dropping his hands from Bend’s head.

  “Someone has built a kind of shielding in his mind,” Keven said to us. “I’ve seen this before. There are triggers there that when tripped, give him directions he must follow. I have seen this before, and many factory mages here wear similar tainting their minds—I have been trying to cleanse each of them, one by one.”

  No wonder Keven looked so tired. He continued. “I have had some luck in stripping out this kind of work, though I must be honest with you, it doesn’t work with everyone. Some don't respond well to healing, others even go mad. Give me some time to work with him.”

  I stepped out of the room and left Dirk to watch Keven start the process.

  Moving through the front room and out onto the porch, leaning heavily on my staff, I felt slightly stronger today, just enough to walk on my own. In front of me, mages drilled with Greer and Ehren, training in various spellcasting. I sat at a table on the porch and laid my staff to the side, breathing deep for a moment.

  I started to sift through everything in my mind.

  This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  We had started to build another outpost a few miles from here, where we could quickly relocate if this house was threatened again.

  Maybe it would be best to go there now, I thought. Our scouts were on high alert and we had doubled their rotations and moved them a little further out so we could give ourselves ample warning. But if Uof came at us in force, we wouldn’t have much time and we’d surely be out-manned and out-gunned.

  Uof would attack us again, of that we felt certain.

  We were a genuine threat to him and he knew it. I watched our men drill. Twenty-five or so of Dirk’s fighters trained—a couple more men had left to attend to family business in the city—and here they were all doing some version of push ups alongside our mages, who continued to cast various spells at Greer's suggestion.

  We had more Spellcasters, including more than thirty of The Factory mages, another dozen or so new mages, all of whom seemed faithful to our cause. While I wondered how many of the Factory mages dealt with some form of cleansing in their minds, we were still a force to be reckoned with.

  However, if Ruath was the most powerful mage on the planet—supposing he'd collected spells from his captured mages for many years, possibly even decades—then he was our single biggest hurdle to overcome. In future battles, we had to concentrate all of our attention and firepower on him alone. Uof would pose a threat as well, but I thought we could come up with ways to literally and figuratively, trip him up.

  We’d seen no evidence yet that Uof was a mage. And I wasn’t fooled by his eight-foot metallic frame, which seemed partially powerful, and partially just a show—not a genuine advantage. If we could take down both Uof and Ruath, I felt sure the rest of the Vale soldiers would scatter or fall apart.

  Then there was this new, larger Factory itself. If we could close down the second Factory, the main source of Motorized weapons as we understood it, I guessed that we could rescue even more mages and perhaps, slowly begin to heal the land.

  I pulled my leather notebook out of my cloak, along with a nub of a pencil. This notebook contained detailed notations of most of the spells that I had learned or created over decades in tiny, careful script, though I left out the most dangerous spells, all of which I had memorized.

  I slowly began to write.

  In my notes today, I sought to write out a vision for what was to come. What if we managed to destroy The Factory? How would we then heal the land? What if we managed to kill or imprison Uof, and Ruath, or both? How would we command the armies of Vale? How would we distribute the very little water that remained to those who still lived? How would we begin to populate outlying villages again?

  I wrote for hours, beginning to sweat in the heat as I did. While the men continued to train, I fell into a bit of a trance, continuing to write pages and pages about the place that I felt Vale could become with time, attention, careful planning, and hard work.

  After I’d written down my ideas and hopes for the army, and our Spellcasters, and for the people of Vale, rough though they might be, a plan for what we needed to do started to come into focus. We needed to attack the larger Factory, and soon. Our foes would meet us there. Would they plan for our approach? Of course they would. If so, we had to defy their expectations. I scratched my chin, thinking on how we might do this. I made some notes on my ideas.

  Then I wrote down more spells, new ones I’d learned in the past few months but neglected to record. I reluctantly wrote down the others I knew, even the most dangerous spells all of which would require great talent, time, and training to learn and control.

  Our men had scouted the second Factory, which was a half day’s hike above Vale itself, and its defenses were formidable. Mage Beacons stood every ten feet all around The Factory walls and on the grounds around the area, and the walls stood higher than we could easily scale with our own arms and legs.

  Not that this had stopped us before. We would need ropes and grappling hooks just to get inside the building.

  One of our scouts managed to get inside the new factory and reported seeing a sea of machines, mages at the side of each, working as we’d seen in the other factory. However, there weren’t dozens of mages this time, but hundreds upon hundreds of them.

  In addition, the entire army of Vale—maybe five hundred soldiers strong—had set up camp around The Factory and we knew now that Uof and Ruath had stationed themselves there, building up their defenses against any kind of attack. They had dug deep trenches, embedding themselves into the landscape as if readying for a large-scale battle.

  Clearly, that sneak attack hadn't been meant to kill us all, it was another needling attack to keep us off-balance, perhaps to measure the strength of our remaining forces, which were relatively few now.

  I unfolded a sketch of the valley made by one of the scouts and spread it over the table before me. We could only enter the valley from a narrow canyon to the Southeast, while the mountains to the West towered into the air directly behind The Factory walls, a natural barrier to any attack. An approach from the North wouldn’t get past the large cliffs bordering the valley from that side. An approach from the East was doomed to fail as well, due to more tall cliff walls.

  But we'd scaled cliffs before, hadn't we? I thought. On the other hand, what did we have going for us?

  We had far fewer men, which meant we could be much more nimble in our movements. We had mages who could fight for our cause, the army of Vale only had Ruath that we'd seen so far. Our men had spirit and were fighting for their lives, their homes, their families.

  Perhaps we could create a diversion of some kind and draw Uof’s army out of the valley itself, leaving their backsides exposed—and then our men could attack from above, descending into the canyon surpassing them. I mused on that plan for a moment longer.

  Suddenly, Dirk stepped outside, his eyes glistening. I realized that I’d been writing and thinking and planning for nearly four hours. I looked up at him expectantly.

  “It worked,” he said. “He cleansed Bend’s mind.”