“What?”
He frowned. “You don’t think it is completely natural, do you?”
“You must not know all that much about sorcery,” she said. “The power of the sorcerer comes from within.” That was part of it, though not all. It was the power within the sorcerer that allowed them to connect to a greater power in the world.
“Does it?” He frowned at her again, then started down the stairs, leading her.
Jayna followed, hurrying after him. Enchanted light glowed along the wall, every five or six steps as they headed down into the depths of the earth. The walls were narrow, and the humidity lifted quickly as they descended.
“Why are you bringing me down here?”
“Because you have asked a series of difficult questions.”
“You could have told me the answers up above.”
“I could have,” he said. “But as I said, I have no interest in drawing that kind of attention.”
“And what kind of attention is that?”
He reached another door at the bottom of the stairs. This one was different than the one above. It was all metal, iron, and rather than pulling out an enchanted item, he pulled a massive key from his pocket and stuffed it into the lock, pushing the door open.
He stepped forward, into the darkness.
Jayna hesitated, glancing up the stairs. She thought again about how she would much rather have Eva with her, especially now. She had no idea what Raollet intended by bringing her down here, but she could imagine him trapping her here, holding her. She had access to enough magic through the Toral ring, especially now that it was augmented with bloodstone, but the iron on the doorway would blunt some of the effect of the spells.
“I’m not going through there,” she said.
“Then you won’t find what you are looking for,” his voice said, coming from the other side of the door.
“Why?”
“Because answers are here,” he said.
Jayna hesitated a moment, twisting her ring on her finger again, before stepping forward.
As soon as she did, she felt a wash of energy come over her. It was cold, as if she had stepped through a waterfall, yet there was power present unlike anything she had felt before. She had thought it wasn’t enchanted, but she was wrong.
Everything about this place struck her as enchanted. She stood in place for a long moment, looking around and feeling the power as it rolled over her.
“What is this place?”
“Come along,” he said.
It was a narrow hall, then it opened up into a wide doorway, and from there they stepped into a large room. As before, there came another washing of power, cold energy that flushed her, leaving her trembling for just a moment. He regarded her as she stood in place, as if trying to decide how she was going to react.
Jayna needed to know whether she still had access to power. Sorcery was one thing, though she didn’t know if she could place a spell in this room, especially given the enchantments along the wall, which might prevent her from drawing upon her magic. But what about the Toral ring?
As she probed around the energy in the room, reaching for what she could detect, she felt a bit of resistance against her. It was subtle at first, but the more she tried to reach for that power, the more she began to feel it continue to push back against her.
Still, she could access the energy through the Toral ring. It was still there. If nothing else, she wasn’t going to be trapped here, powerless.
He watched her.
“You will find that sorcery is not quite as effective down here as it is up above.”
She just nodded.
“The founders of the city, at least those who founded it after the El’aras, decided they didn’t want sorcerers to have unlimited ability to attack.” He swept his gaze around the room. “This was meant to be a safe space for them.”
Jayna laughed as she looked around. “A safe space?” She shook her head. “I think you have it wrong.”
He frowned at her. “Why?”
She shrugged. “There’s nothing about this place that suggests it’s a safe space. This is a prison.”
She paused at one of the walls. Beams of metal were embedded deep within the stone. She could feel the energy of the iron, and it pressed up against her, as if it were carving against some aspect of her sorcery. It was more than that though. She could feel the enchantment upon the wall. She held her hand above the wall’s surface and could trace the pattern of the enchantment, even though she couldn’t see it. She kept her eyes closed as she worked, running her hand in a small circle, feeling for the power within the wall.
“You won’t be able to remove anything here.”
Jayna shook her head. “I’m not trying to. I’m just trying to understand what’s here.”
“You won’t be able to do that either.”
She turned back to him. “What are you?” She was ready with the Toral ring, ready to summon power, to wrap it around him in case he revealed some nefarious intention. That was her concern. She had no idea if he was actually a dark sorcerer, if he served one of the twelve. The knowledge he possessed indicated something potentially dangerous about his position, but what?
“I’m not what you believe,” Raollet said, standing in front of a table.
Jayna glanced down at it. Resting on the table was some massive leatherbound book with pages that looked to be impossibly old. He rested his hand on the book, as if he were touching some source of power.
“If you aren’t one of them,” she said slowly and carefully, letting him decide what “one of them” was, “then what are you?”
He looked up at her. “A scholar. Or I had been in a different time. Now I might be called an opportunist, but I still think of myself as what I had once been.”
Jayna frowned at him. “A scholar?”
“There are some of us in the city who try to understand. We recognize that things are not the way they once were.”
“And by ‘the way they once were,’ you mean when the El’aras ruled?”
“That, and even before.” He flipped one of the pages of the book, his gaze drifting along its surface.
Jayna took a step toward him, looking over his shoulder, trying to make out the writing, but much like in the book he had in the shop above ground, she couldn’t read it.
He took a deep breath, letting it out slowly as he looked around the inside of the room. “We have tried to understand the powers in the world. We have tried to understand the way they influence us, especially here, at the edge of the kingdom, a place where power seems to stop.”
“What was that?”
He shrugged, looking up at her. “Here. It’s a place where power seems to stop, such as it is. Not the power of sorcery. That does not seem to have any bounds. As far as we can tell, the Society has influence wherever they choose to go.”
“Because sorcery is a part of the world,” Jayna said.
“Or because sorcery borrows power from the world,” he said.
She shrugged. “I’m not so sure how that is all that different.”
“It is different enough that it matters.” He flipped the pages of the book again before looking back up at her. “When you begin to read accountings of the powers in the world, you find all sorts of things. Not only the El’aras, but stories of the Ashara, Porapeth, Ogaran, and several others.”
Jayna frowned. She hadn’t heard of Porapeth or Ogaran. Now she didn’t know if Raollet was trying to tell her his own stories, or if there was something more to it.
He traced his finger along the surface of the page, pausing at several different words.
He looked back at her. “Can you read this?”
She shook her head quickly. “I can’t. You know I can’t.”
He smiled tightly. “I didn’t know you couldn’t, but I suspected.” He shrugged. “This is one of the earliest volumes like this in Nelar.”
“They didn’t speak the common tongue at the time?”
&nbs
p; “The people who first migrated to Nelar, the dular who settled here, all came from different places. There was a unifying language that came together, bridging them, and you know that as the common tongue, but before that, they did not all speak the same.”
“What is this?”
“This would be Brish. It’s a complicated language, one that few people speak these days.”
“You do.”
“Oh, no. It’s not something one speaks so much as reads. It’s a difficult language to speak.” He frowned as he paused his finger at one word. “Thankfully, I have learned quite a bit from this. Having had a chance to study this language has given me an opportunity to learn about things such as the El’aras, and what was involved in excluding them from the kingdom.”
It would be interesting to learn, she couldn’t deny that. The El’aras had lived in these lands, all of these lands, far before anyone else, and had only been excluded from them through the settlement of the kingdom, forced outward. Jayna had learned some of that within the Academy, but not all of it. There were aspects to what had taken place that she simply didn’t know.
There was something about what he’d been telling her that bothered her more than she could put a finger on. “Why would anybody care to make it look like the Ashara attacked?”
“I don’t know. If you believe the stories, the Ashara once were seen in these lands, though it was long ago.”
Jayna started to smile. “Why would they have disappeared?”
“I imagine for the same reason that magic is targeted by the Society. The Ashara would feel threatened.”
“You said they were supposed to be the natural enemy to the El’aras.”
“That was long ago,” he said, waving his hand. “If the stories are even true. If not, then it doesn’t matter. Whoever the El’aras fought were pushed back from these lands as the El’aras claimed this place as their own.” He turned a few pages in the book. “There was a time, before humankind spread through here, when the El’aras were the conquerors. Eventually, that changed, and humankind became the conquerors.” He shrugged. “Perhaps there was a time when the Ashara were the conquerors, if you were to reach far enough back in history, and if you believe the stories.”
There was no doubting in Jayna’s mind that Eva had a specific kind of magic that was unique to her, something that Jayna had never experienced before—and something that left her wondering just how much power Eva really had.
What if she was Ashara?
As strange as it felt to acknowledge it, the stories might fit with what she knew of Eva.
Not the shape changing, but Raollet didn’t claim to know much about that anyway. What if something in that change stole her memories?
“You still haven’t explained why you brought me down here.”
He nodded and flipped to the end of the book. “You asked a very specific question.” He paused, looking over her shoulder and back toward the stairs, tipping his head to the side and frowning. After standing there for a little while, he finally relaxed and looked back at the book. “You mentioned a specific name.”
“Sarenoth.”
“I have not heard it said quite like that, though perhaps that is its pronunciation.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you have mentioned several other names. Asymorn. Norej. There are a few more I have uncovered in my research, but they all serve the same entity.” He tapped on a section of the book. “It’s spelled quite a bit differently.”
She leaned over, and though she couldn’t read the words, the letters were mostly the same. Sar’entothel.
“Do you think it’s Sarenoth?”
“It is a similar sound. Perhaps it’s a translation. As I said, this is Brish, and at the time this book was written, there were others written as well, others that had different languages involved. He was celebrated as a god, the same as Arathon, Grathorl, Var’anlal, and others whose names I cannot even speak, or read for that matter.”
Jayna hadn’t heard of any of those gods. Maybe Ceran had, and she tried to commit the names to memory so she could ask him the next time she saw him.
“They were celebrated as gods?”
She hadn’t learned that about them, but maybe it was true.
“Gods. Or simply great power. How am I to know?”
She watched him. He was a scholar and knew more than she had realized. It would make sense that the twelve would want to serve a god, but if they did, it would have to be some dark god. One responsible for the dark magic in the world.
“What more do you know about the twelve?”
“Why, the same as you, I suppose.”
“I don’t know what you’re getting on about.”
“The twelve, such as you call them, should be known to any who has attended the Academy, such as yourself. Perhaps they were called by a different name then. In fact, that would make the most sense.” He flipped the book closed and rested his hands on it, then looked up at Jayna, fixing her with a hard stare. “The twelve were the original sorcerers.”
11
Jayna’s heart skipped. She didn’t think that was correct.
It couldn’t be, could it?
Ceran would’ve said something to her. Ceran had recruited her, looking for somebody who was willing to hunt dark magic, and had picked her specifically for her willingness to do so. Jayna had eagerly agreed to search out dark magic, especially given what she had learned about her parents. Plus, she thought it might give her an opportunity to find out more about what had happened to Jonathan.
She held his gaze. “What do you mean, they were the original sorcerers? When I was training at the Academy, we never spoke of the founding of the Sorcerers’ Society.”
“Wouldn’t you be intrigued to know?”
Jayna shrugged, looking around the room, feeling the power there. Maybe this was a cell, as she had initially suspected. The energy that constricted around her would certainly hold, and given the iron worked into it—which had always affected magic—there was no reason it wouldn’t.
She pushed those thoughts away. What was she doing thinking about that sort of thing when she had something more urgent to focus on?
“I suppose I haven’t really given it much thought. I didn’t know if it mattered. It happened so long ago that the Society spoke of it as myth.”
Like stories about the Ashara.
“History matters, Jayna Aguelon. The more you know about history, the easier it is for you to anticipate what might happen in the future.”
“You care about history because you care about the power that you cannot acquire.”
“That is but a part of it,” he said, nodding. “There is something to be said about some of the older enchantments.” He smiled tightly, slipping his gaze along the walls before looking down at the book then up at her. “The earliest dular had a very different appreciation for what they could do with their enchantments.”
“You mean they had weapons.”
“Not everything is a weapon, Jayna Aguelon.”
That was different from what Telluminder had said to her about the enchantments, though maybe Master Raollet was right.
“No, not everything is a weapon,” she agreed with him, and crossed her arms over her chest, her mind racing. How much of this had Ceran known?
More than ever, she wanted an opportunity to talk to him, to try to find out what he might have known. He had wanted to show her some of the twelve, but if the twelve had been the original sorcerers . . .
It meant they were incredibly old.
Sorcerers don’t live that long.
She had learned about some sorcerers who could extend their lives, and magic in general permitted a longer lifespan than others, but she had never known any sorcerer to live for centuries at a time.
“You are troubled by this,” he said. “I’m not surprised. It might be difficult for you to take it in.”
“It’s not difficult. And I think you aren’t quite right.”
“Considering the dular settled in Nelar, they would choose their history.”
“Exactly. Still . . .”
“You don’t think they were misleading.”
He shook his head. “I do not.”
“Why not?”
“Because there are too many elements here that are consistent with what I’ve uncovered elsewhere. It’s not only what I’ve found in this book or what I’ve seen in the enchantments we’ve uncovered. It’s also in . . .” He rested his hands on the book, looking up and holding her gaze for a moment. “I just remembered that perhaps I shouldn’t share all of this with somebody who was so willing to attack my shop.”
“I didn’t attack your shop. I was trying to prevent you from attacking the El’aras.”
“An interesting choice from a sorcerer.”
“Perhaps not nearly as interesting if you’d learn anything about sorcerers.”
He chuckled. “I have shared with you what I know.”
“You’ve shared with me what you want me to know, but you haven’t shared with me everything you know.” There was a possibility that he was trying to mislead her, trying to guide her into taking action, or perhaps trying to simply misinform her. Jayna had enough experience not to trust him completely, but at the same time, why would he tell her what he had thinking it would cause a reaction?
She didn’t know.
“What do you hope to get out of this?” Jayna asked.
“You claimed you were there for the Festival of the Mourn.”
“I was there. I stopped Gabranth from freeing Asymorn.”
“Why here?” Raollet said, tapping his mouth.
“I don’t know. I just know they were attempting to go through with their dark festival to free some power. Or perhaps even to free Asymorn.”
“And did they succeed?”
Smoke and Memories (The Dark Sorcerer Book 3) Page 12
