Kevin Stein - Brother's Majere

Powerful hands grabbed hold of his ankles and jerked him to the floor. The demon’s paws smashed down onto his ears, stunning him. The creature extended its claws and cut down under the warrior’s armor, digging forward, dragging dirty talons through his flesh.

The pain brought Caramon to his senses, and he kicked up with his legs, knocking the demon over. Leaping after it, he tried to pin it to the floor. The demon slipped out of his hold, and Caramon scrambled backward.

His sword was high above him, and he cursed himself for his carelessness. Then he put his hand on something on the floor and, thinking he recognized it by its feel, he closed his fingers over it.

The demon reached for its wand, snarling in dismay when its clawed fingers closed on air.

“This what you lost?” Caramon said, holding up the weapon.

The demon leaped for it. The warrior brought his knee up straight at its stomach. The creature doubled over and Caramon clasped both arms around the demon in a bear hug, muscles straining against its dark fur, crushing until he felt bones snap beneath his grip. The body went limp. Dropping the corpse to the floor, the warrior leaned against the wall, gasping for breath. After a short time, he moved back up to the hole in the ceiling, lifting himself easily through the portal and onto the empty rooftop. Picking up his blade, he crawled to the edge and stared down to see if the other demon had returned with-

A powerful fist slammed across the side of his head, nearly sending him reeling over the edge of the roof. The demon, apparently uninjured, bared its fangs, biting deep into the human’s shoulder.

Caramon stifled his cry of pain for fear of alerting any others of its kind, and brought the hilt of his sword up into the demon’s chin, knocking it backward. The warrior slashed the bastard sword across in a horizontal arc, cleaving the head from furred shoulders.

White and silver spots danced before Caramon’s vision. His legs weakened and gave out under his weight, forcing him to sit down roughly on the smooth stone. Stretching himself out on the roof, closing his eyes to the image of the Great Eye, he swallowed, breathing hard.

“And there’s an army of these things!” he said with a groan.

In his room in Barnstoke Hall, Raistlin removed several black bags from his pack-flat pouches heavily lined with fur and other soft materials. He opened one of them to reveal an array of bottles and tubes, capped with cork and stoppered with rubber blocks, containing a variety of colored liquids and crystals and powders. Unfolding a brass frame used to store chemicals while working, he took the containers out from their holding straps and placed them into their proper locations-solids in front, liquids at the back.

Another pouch produced a shallow mixing dish with matching pestle and a glass bottle of clear liquid with a wick jutting from the top. From another he drew a melting pan and stand, and a smaller pan with a handle covered in wound leather. A third contained holding stands, tiny metal chains, and various silvered tools.

The mage erected the apparatus on top of the table. Reaching into his voluminous robes, he pulled out a hollow gold tube, as long as one of his gold fingers, unadorned by symbol or rune, and placed it next to the pan.

Raistlin sat in a chair, placing his hands on his knees, fists clenched in concentration. He began to search through his memories for the proper potion-an elixir that would suit his purpose. Ingredients began to filter through his mind as he allowed the discipline of alchemy to take control of his consciousness, his knowledge of the world and familiarity with the art drawing out an answer.

A pinch of white powder as the base, another of black to equalize, blood from all parties, the symbols of sympathetic magic, dust taken at great risk to spirit and body, clear crystals to bend, green to expand, red to destroy, heat to forge, a cylinder of gold to cool .

“And alcohol,” Raistlin concluded, coming out of his near-trance.

He stood and set to work, putting the bottles he was not going to use back into their holding straps, closing the pouch and setting it aside for safety. With a long fingernail, he drew a measured amount of rough, white powder, most of which had clung together into small clumps, from a bottle and tapped it out onto the melting pan.

He lit the wick on the squat clear bottle, summoning up a dancing yellow flame. Taking a dark bottle from the rack, Raistlin carefully removed the rubber stopper, revealing a small spoon pushed into the bottom. Removing an amount equal to the white powder, he mixed them together with a wooden rod-a thin stick no wider than a leaf of grass-and spread the now gray mixture into a thin ring with an open center.

Throwing the stick far across the room with a flick of his wrist, the mage wiped a small bead of sweat that had formed on his brow. He tried to keep his thoughts and purpose straight, clear and free from influence, but-looking at the materials before him-he caught his breath, hands trembling. His eyes closed tight for a moment.

His will held. He opened his eyes.

The mage removed three more bottles from the rack, each containing crystal shards of varying sizes and shapes-one was clear, another green, and the third red. He removed a piece of the clear crystal and placed it on the shallow dish, crushing it against the metal with the marble hammer. He wiped the debris from the tool on his sleeve. Doing the same with the other crystals, he began to measure the amounts he thought he would need with the edge of his little finger-a bit of red gone, add a little more green, too much clear, then, not enough.

Raistlin was conscious of time passing and fought down the impulse to hurry, crushing additional rock and taking it away until the balance was finally correct. He took all the clear powder and combined it with uneven parts of the others-more green than red-rubbing it against his thumb and forefinger until their individual colors became part of the whole, inseparable. He added the new mixture into the confines of the gray-powder ring on the melting pan.

Wiping his hands on his red robes, Raistlin rubbed his eyes, which were beginning to ache from the strain. Then, with a silver knife, he scraped the blood off the gold ring Earwig had worn. The mage worked quickly, dropping the dried flakes into the small pan with the leather handle.

He reached for another stoppered bottle. This one was coated with black patches, as if it were diseased. Raistlin opened it with more care than any previous bottle, drawing back at the stench that rose out from it like a wraith. Holding the container in his fist, leaving only the mouth and end exposed, he tapped its back.

A cloud of darkness reached forward and engulfed the blood, discoloring the dried fluid to a darker shade. The mage tilted the bottle back up and placed the top on it again just as the rest of the contents began to writhe out, grasping for the promise of another’s life.

Raistlin let out a long sigh, relieved to be free of the deadly dust. Setting the pan down, he took the remaining crystals and dumped them into a crucible, holding the vessel with a pair of metal tongs over the flame, watching as they melted together.

When they began to glow from the heat, he dropped the dried blood in, the flakes instantly disappearing with a puff of dirty smoke.

“Wait! There’s something missing,” he whispered, catching his error. Searching through his materials, he grew increasingly frustrated. “I cannot find it! And without the stone, this won’t work!”

Raistlin clutched a hand to his chest in frustration, tearing at the cloth, when he suddenly noticed something hard and round in one of his inner pockets-a disk on a chain. Hastily, he removed the object.