Duplicity With the Demagogue

There aren’t many upsides to being the best friend of a psychotic murderer beyond your own survival. When I first knew him the future Lord of Death’s Fire was just a talented mage who tolerated me in his long shadow. I was a coward not to try harder to divert him from the violent road he started down.

He always had a short temper. The Masters of the College of Magi could not contain his curiosity or keep up with his raw power. I was the runt of the class, passing only I think because tutors were hoping my timid nature would rub off on Maz.

When we were ten, we joined the College of Magi. Both of us had displayed a talent for magic. I had caused a tree to flower out of season. My parents sent me to the College of Magi hoping I would become a mighty sorcerer and become wealthy to look after them in their old age.

When he was five Maz burnt his neighbours house down for making fun of his eyes, the left of which is green and the right blue. His parents sent him to the College of Magi hoping to get him as far away from them as possible.

Mighty Maz was already infamous when he began his teachings. From the start his terrifying charisma drew the more violent students to him. I was drawn to him because most people don’t like me. I tend to say exactly what I’m thinking which gets on people’s nerves. I thought Maz was incredible, and he never minded being told that, nor other people hearing it. The way I saw it he was right; he had been shunned as we all were for our power. We didn’t choose to be what we were and ignoring it just ended with dangerous accidents.

I had imagined the College of Magi would be a castle on a cliff by the sea. What I found were a series of wooden longhouses by the shore and some floating pods tied together in an artificial marina. The Masters had their own rooms in a marble tower at the top of a hill overlooking the bay. The rest of us stayed in dorm huts.

Each year about a hundred new students would join the school at the end of summer during their tenth year. By the end of that year Maz had five of us in his pocket and trusted me most of all for I was in his dorm. I suppose I was the least threatening of his followers. The others were ambitious backstabbers. I was just a sheep who needed a shepherd but followed a wolf.

Maz has always been skeletal. He doesn’t care for food beyond sustenance. I’m at the other end of the scale and not as tall as he is.

Lessons taught us to focus our power to avoid wanton destruction. Maz taught us to let our power go wild with all out might. His lessons were popular among the cabal than those of our Masters. He was never excessively insolent in class. He wanted us to know what the Master’s had to teach for his Day of Reckoning. We were never told what it meant but it sounded exciting. The cabal would whisper amongst themselves about what he had in mind.

When Maz’s extracurricular activities became public knowledge, he was threatened with expulsion. Expulsion required a majority vote from the Masters. The night before the vote his two harshest critics went to bed and by the morning, they were dead with no clear reason why.

Master Hullen had often shared stories about being cast out of his family for his affinity with magic. Hullen advocated for my friend until only two of the remaining seven Masters voted for Maz’s expulsion. Master Chiana Morgaine refused to remain at the college with the boy she considered the murderer of two of her friends.

Morgaine was a legend of rain and lightning magic known as the Lady of Stormy Nights. As she walked away up the hill dark clouds gathered over us and for the next week it rained constantly.

Our second-year dorm was spacious. Each of us had a carved four poster bed instead of bunk beds in a room for four not eight. Tapestries of our famous forebears hung on the walls to keep the cold out.

It had been a week since Morgaine’s departure. The clouds were finally parting over the long houses as I dressed in my breeches, undershirt, poncho, and the cloak embroidered with the college’s crest. On all our cloaks and the flags that flew above the buildings was the World Serpent circling the Pyramid of the Lost God who had given magic to humanity at the dawn of the world.

“Did you kill them? The two masters?” I asked Maz in a low voice. I slipped on my boots which needed new soles. My best friend looked at me.

“Do you think I did?” he asked. His face squinted as if he couldn’t see me properly. I didn’t move, didn’t blink. I didn’t say a word. He shook his head. “I didn’t kill them Furon. Whatever happened I like to think of it as a fortuitous coincidence and leave it at that.”

“You don’t think someone killed them?” I had to ask. I looked into his blue and green eyes. He donned a rich woven overshirt of linen given to him by Master Hullen. He looked at it and felt the thickness of the threads between his thumb and fingers.

“I think it’s better not to arouse the guilt of whoever might have.”

Third year was less eventful except that Maz the Mighty’s following grew. I was his right hand and his oldest friends the elite of the Cabal of Magi. His skill as a speaker was always improving. Every time he spoke of the Day of Reckoning there was more passion in his voice. Each time his voice reached further into the growing crowd. I felt his power bathing them all with the biding anger and purpose. Soft faces in the crowd hardened in the forge of his words. Troubled consciences were burnt away with words of our suffering. Rage was stoked with hints of vengeance.

Maz began to talk about a nation of our own. He didn’t mention the fact that the maps had no blank spaces. There was nowhere we could go without locals to turn us away. I realised long before he said it aloud that what he meant when he said we would find our place in the world was that we would take it.

Towards the end of third year Master Hullen began talking of raising Maz to the rank of master by the end of fourth year without the mandatory three years of travelling that was the custom. Hullen attended most of the speeches and nodded along to every word.

At dinner Master Kel would gently remind us of the virtue of a tranquil life. I liked Kel. He was a kind old man who had voted to expel Maz but never said another word about it. He had a ruddy, reddish face a short cut beard but a moustache that flowed down past his chin. His silver hair was a crescent around the back of his head. The way he talked and wore his faded cloak he always looked about ready to go to bed. More and more when he gave his speeches, he would look in the direction of Maz and I. There was never a hint of anger in his brown eyes which were fading to grey as he went blind.

Kel’s stories of the great hero sorcerers were warming tales like comfort food. When all had seemed lost, and people faced a hideous monster or a terrible disaster a magi or two would arrive. With love in their hearts the magi would slay the monsters or turn them away. They would quench the flames of fires. They would turn back the waters of floors.

Maz always left the dinner hall the moment he had eaten. The rest of the Cabal of Magi would follow him. I stayed with the younger students or those who had never fallen under the spell of my best friend.

One night as his stories finished Master Kel summoned me to his side with a gnarled finger and embraced me as if I was his son. When he let me go I sensed concern in him.

            “Stick by his side Furon. Maz will need you in his ear to calm his pain. You have a kind heart. Wear it on your sleeve more often. Seeing it would be good for him. He had a tough life before he came here but no one is beyond love.”

            “Are you alright Master Kel?” I asked. His brown eyes weren’t meeting mine nor were they focused much on anything. As he talked his voice was winding down to a whisper.

            “I will be quite well soon enough my boy,” he said. I had to lean closer to hear him. “There’s no ache good dreams can’t help. Stay kind Furon. Always be kind.” With that he shuffled away. The tap of his walking stick on the floor echoed off the wooden walls.

After drinking to the graduation of the fourth years at the start of summer that year Master Kel took a tumble down the stairs of the Master’s Tower in the night. When he was found there were flowers growing from his mouth and nostrils.

Master Hullen took Kel’s place as the Grandmaster of the college which was usually reserved for the oldest of the masters. From then on, the others deferred to him as much out of fear as respect.

For fourth year Maz taught a class. It was unheard of for anyone to teach without achieving the rank of Master after their three years aiding civilians and pointing untaught magi towards the college. Maz taught a mixture of offensive magic and the history of our suppression by fearful mobs. Most magi who had been killed in by the mundane community had been murdered in their sleep. It was the only way a regular person stood a chance. His lessons were unique for two reasons. Under Kel’s tenure magic had never been taught for use as a weapon. Neither had Kel focused on the history of anything except the ways magi had become hero’s beloved by all and how each of us should aspire to that end.

Kel’s peaceful rhetoric disappeared almost overnight. I was too naïve, too close to Maz and his propaganda to see that a coup had taken place. When Kez taught we were the mighty guardians and healers the world would grow to love individually. Maz told us we were the few survivors of a tradition spurned by the world, vulnerable to the ignorance of the mundane commoners. With kind old Kel in charge I had been calm and slept soundly. With Grandmaster Hullen and Maz I felt charged up, ready to fight but scared all the while.

The Grandmaster and the future Lord of Death’s Fire had both come from backgrounds of discrimination and fear. They made it seem that there was no other way. Despite having grown up in a village that proved otherwise I fell for it. All the magi did or seemed to. Sometimes children were expelled suddenly for voicing views that Hullen didn’t agree with. At the time I was glad that they had been sent away. Maz called them traitors. He said they were too weak to fight for the survival of the magi. It took me many years to admit they were right.

I think that Kel had seen exactly what was coming. Maz was far from the first man to rise to power using an empowered elite motivated by fear. He may have been right that I could have turned my best friend away from his violent path. By the time I tried he was already wading in blood.

When he graduated fourth year Maz was named Master and given a place by Grandmaster Hullen’s side. They expanded the College of Magi significantly and began scouring far larger areas for those with magical talent. Walls grew around the college which began to look more and more like a fortress. Third year students were given guard duties to stand on the wall tops day and night in shifts. The mandatory three years of journeying to attain the level of Master was extended to four and a further two years were added to teaching beforehand so that instead of taking seven years it would take ten to achieve the rank of Master Magi.

For all that time the students were indoctrinated with Maz and Hullen’s paranoia. They weren’t teaching the next generation of healers and heroes. They were amassing an army.

There was a town called Bluesmith a hundred miles from the college which had burned magi. What Maz didn’t mention so much was that the three magi had been holding the town to ransom and killing people every day that their demands weren’t met.

Maz went in person to demand the official apology of Bluesmith for the massacre. It ended with him burning the mayor alive.

            “Just the mayor,” he said, “for the insult.”

Killing a mayor isn’t something the King of a country just lets go. A legion of soldiers marched to the College of Magi to demand that Maz surrender himself to be tried for murder. Maz asked if he would receive the same kind of trial the magi had in Bluesmith.

So began the Seige of the College of Magi. For three months an army of one hundred soldiers camped outside the walls of the college. After three months the majority of the kingdom’s army descended upon the college. Six thousand soldiers attacked the college with trebuchets which did nothing to calm the rage of Maz’s Cabal of Magi.

Maz allowed the army to attack the college for a week. To this day I can only guess that he wanted to let magi die by the hands of the enemy before he retaliated. Two of the younger magi took direct hits from the trebuchets. They were the only magi to die during the siege and the battle that followed.

On day seven Maz walked from through the gates of the college with Grandmaster Hullen and a hundred of the cabal behind him. They set the countryside ablaze. None of the soldiers escaped. I watched from the walls. That was the moment I knew I had been wrong to stand by his side.

I should have known years before. I had hidden behind the idea that everything he was doing was based on words. He was a teacher. He united our people. He wasn’t responsible for the deaths which had happened around him. I’d almost convinced myself that the mayor of Bluesmith deserved to die. I’d never heard men screaming as they burned before. I had never seen them writhing in agony, wreathed in flames as they shrivelled in their armour to black smoking wreckage.

It took years for the black halo around the school to disappear beneath new growth. During that time, I retreated from Maz as much as I could. I feigned illness to be away from his machinations.

Nearby towns and villages were forced to swear oaths of loyalty and pay taxes to the college. A mighty black stone keep rose on the hilltop overlooking the bay and the army of the dead. Grandmaster Hullen became Maz’s general as he became a warlord.

Every castle and keep in the kingdom were burnt to their foundations. Five years after the Maz’s College Massacre the kingdom of Landfall was his. New armies were trained by defectors from the old. Each legion of a hundred soldiers was always accompanied by ten Master level magi. In no time at all there were a hundred legions.

Maz looks every bit the king now. His long black hair is oiled and perfumed. He wears red and gold silks as the king used to. In winter he wears coats with black fur trimmings. His crown is golden flames mounted with red rubies, all taken from the old king.

Magi don’t need to be found much anymore. They flee to the college for fear that they will be killed in their sleep. Maz’s warnings were a self-fulfilling prophecy. We are feared and hated for the death and the destruction we have wrought.

The college is unrecognisable. Once everything was wooden with space for less than a thousand students at a time. Two storey high longhouses were replaced with five storey high keeps of the same black stone as the keep. Up to ten thousand students and soldiers can house within the walls now as a town spreads beyond the walls outside.

Massacres committed by the Cabal of Magi must be named after the location now because there have been so many. The last friends of Grandmaster Kel hung themselves in protest at the bloody direction the college has taken.

He’s sleeping right now. He snores. I can see his neck as I hold the silvery knife in my hand. Maz was my best friend in the world. I can’t let him go on. I’ve seen his plans to invade other kingdoms. I wonder if I’ll manage to kill him before he wakes and incinerates me. If he wakes, I might literally wear my heart on my sleeve as I die. It’s repulsive to kill a man in his sleep. Sadly, there is no other way for a weakling like me to kill a godlike magi like him. 

I wonder if it was Hullen or Maz that killed Grandmaster Kel. No matter. I know exactly how Maz is going to die. Gods give me strength. The time has come. I could not be kind, but I can be brave.