Disciple of War Disciple of War (Art of the Adept #4) - Michael G. Manning Page 0,31

It made perfect sense. With a solid defense, the man could wait for his elemental to recover and return to aid him. Given the injuries Will had already sustained, he doubted he could survive another encounter with the earth elemental.

The distance was still too great for a force-lance given the amount of turyn that remained to him, so instead Will summoned his crossbow from the limnthal, catching it with his free left hand and firing wildly in the direction of his enemy. It was a desperate action, one that had no chance of hitting, but it served its intended purpose. The sorcerer saw the crossbow and reflexively jumped to one side, ruining the spell he was attempting to construct. Will grinned wickedly at him and kept walking.

He wanted to run, but his ribs wouldn’t allow that. Sending the crossbow back into extra-dimensional storage, he spoke to his foe. “You have two options at this point: stand and die or run and die. Either way I’m going to kill you, but I think your chances might be a tiny bit better if you run.” He was almost within twenty yards now, and a force-lance was close to being a practical option.

The sorcerer ran.

“Shit,” he swore. “I had to open my damned mouth.” Will put everything he had into a force-lance, aiming low in the hopes of merely wounding his target. A wave of dizziness passed over him as his turyn dropped to practically nothing—and he missed. “Goddamn it!” Swaying on his feet, Will began pulling in turyn as quickly as he could manage, while simultaneously constructing a light-darts spell with five missiles.

Pain and fatigue slowed him down, and it was ten seconds before he was ready, and by then his target had covered more than a hundred yards, putting him somewhere close to a hundred and twenty yards distant. “Mother! He’s fast,” muttered Will. It was pure luck that the grassy slope was only littered with small boulders and a few scrubby trees, offering the sorcerer little cover.

Lining up his shot, Will tried to space the light-darts evenly across six or seven feet to improve his chances that at least one would hit the man. He was gratified to see the sorcerer jerk slightly then stumble. At least one hit, he thought, but his enemy kept running. Will changed tactics and used the next minute to construct another travel-disk. By the time he had finished, the sorcerer was no longer in view, having disappeared into a small collection of trees at the base of the hill.

He covered the distance with the travel-disk in a vastly shorter span of time and entered the shadowed eaves. Still he saw no one, so he began gliding slowly forward, using the simple chime spell at intervals to locate his foe if the man had used some sort of magic to hide himself.

Apparently the man didn’t know any camouflage spells, as the chime spell reported nothing, but Will discovered the assassin a moment later when the man stepped out from behind a nearby tree and leveled a surprise fire-bolt at his head. Will deflected it with a point-defense shield and then returned the favor as he instinctively fired a force-lance.

His aim was perfect that time, blowing a fist-sized hole directly through the center of the assassin’s chest. The mustachioed villain stared at him open mouthed for a second, then toppled soundlessly to the forest floor.

“Damn it!” Will swore. He had fully intended to kill the man, but he’d wanted to question him first. Disappointed, he took a moment to release the assassin’s elemental, then prepared to return to Selene.

Chapter 9

Selene was sitting up where he had left her when Will returned, gliding back with the dead sorcerer lying atop the disk next to his feet. The three crossbow bolts were in a neat pile in front of her. Her first words were, “This dress is ruined.”

“Then take it off.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

He shrugged. “I honestly don’t know. We’ve been forced to be celibate for so many months now that I’m not sure my heart could take the sight of you undressed.”

“No concern for voyeurs?”

Will settled the disk to the ground and dismissed it. It crumbled into a pile of gravel with the dead sorcerer’s body atop it. Will pointed to the man. “This is what happened to the last man I caught watching you.”

She grimaced at the sight of the body. “That isn’t funny. What happened to your hands?” Then she spotted his shoulder and