Unseen (First of the Blade Book 2)

by D. K. Holmberg

  Benji traced his fingers across the grasses, then stood and looked up at her. “There is another village not far from here.”

  He hurried forward, and Imogen had to jog to keep up with him. Lilah kept pace, for which Imogen was thankful. They paused at one point to eat and to drink from the waterskins, but Imogen was still not comfortable refilling her water yet.

  They reached the next village near dusk. Much like the last, it was empty.

  Imogen looked around, reminded of the last one. Everybody here had also departed quickly. There was food left on tables, toys all over, and clothing strewn about. Everything suggested a hasty departure.

  Once they reached the far edge of the village, she frowned and looked over to Benji. “This was recent.”

  “It was,” he agreed.

  “It has to be tied to the branox, but why?”

  “I do not know.”

  She turned to Lilah, who was also frowning.

  Benji again crouched and traced his fingers in the grasses. He tipped his head back, inhaling deeply as if a smell on the wind would help determine what they needed to do and where they needed to go.

  He nodded to her. “Come. There should be a place we can camp for the night up ahead.”

  “The wind told you that?”

  “Yes.”

  Imogen knew better than to argue with the Porapeth. They walked for the better part of an hour, swallowed by darkness, until they reached a massive rocky formation that stretched over them, signifying the lower foothills of the mountains. It jutted up from the ground, with a small waterfall spilling out to the west—toward the forest.

  “We’re nearing the mountains,” Imogen said. She looked into the distance, but it was difficult for her to make anything else out in the darkness. The mountains would mean the beginning of Leier lands.

  “Perhaps,” he said.

  “You knew.”

  “The wind tells me many things.”

  She snorted. “You could’ve told me.”

  “We are chasing the branox now.”

  They settled into a small cove in the rock, and Benji gathered dry branches and used them to start a fire. The air filled with the warmth of the flames and the gentle, soothing smoke wafting from it, which drifted to Imogen’s nostrils. She leaned back, chewing on dried jerky, and she passed some meat to Lilah.

  Benji hummed to himself, the sounds carrying into the air before drifting away like the smoke of the campfire. After a while, he turned his attention to Lilah. “We must continue to work on your ability to touch your power. We need you to be able to do so intentionally.”

  “I think she’s done well,” Imogen said.

  Benji looked over to her. “Doing it well is not the same as doing it on command. She needs to be able to reach for that power within her, to draw on everything that’s there, in order to help herself if we are under attack.”

  “If she’s under attack,” Imogen said.

  Benji frowned. “Fine.” He turned back to Lilah. “Start again. Press your fingertips together, and this time bring them to your chest. What do you feel?”

  Lilah brought her fingers together, pressed them against her chest, and took a few deep breaths. “I don’t know what I feel. It sometimes seems like there’s something, but…” She shook her head. “I can’t tell. It’s almost as if there’s something there, something I should be able to feel, but as I focus on it, I can’t find it.”

  “Keep trying,” Benji said. “What I need from you today is for you to feel that connection. The magic within you is borrowed from that of the world. You call it out through you, and then you control it. That is what a sorcerer does.”

  “What about a Porapeth?” Lilah asked.

  Benji glanced over to Imogen, who shrugged.

  “She needed to know,” Imogen said.

  He glowered. “Then I should’ve been the one to share.”

  “Considering what I know of you and how I doubted you were going to share anything, I figured I should tell her what she needed to know.”

  “You don’t get to tell her anything.”

  Imogen chuckled as she crouched down, joining Lilah and pressing her fingertips together. “If he’s going to be like that, I will help you.”

  “You can help?”

  “I use a different technique, but I think what he’s describing is something similar. It’s a meditation.” She looked over to Benji, who was watching her with a frown, but there was no sign that he disagreed. “What I do, and what others who use a similar technique do, is focus on our breathing. Clear everything else out of your mind, including everything you’re thinking of right now. If you have access to magic, it should begin to build.”

  “You sound as if you know what you’re talking about,” Benji said.

  “I know how to meditate. I know how to focus my mind. And I know how to clear it so I can prepare for the next pattern, then the next, and then the next.”

  “Patterns are magic. A form of it, at least. And the sooner you acknowledge that, the sooner you will be able to do more than you have so far.”

  Imogen shook her head. “We’ve moved past that conversation, haven’t we?”

  “I had thought so, but every so often, you seem to get lost in your old line of thinking. It’s dangerous and a waste of your time. You know more than you pretend not to. And you do yourself a disservice by ignoring that.”

  “I’m not ignoring it.”

  Benji grunted. “Focus.” He faced them both, as if he were the master and they were his students.

  Imogen did as he said, pressing her fingers together and focusing on her breathing. Instead of concentrating on some deep-seated power within her, which she knew was not there, she focused on what she could control.

  The sacred patterns.

  That was how she was going to master them.

  She breathed, her mind tracing through each of the patterns, following the flows. For the first time, as she meditated, she simply focused on how her body moved, not the sword. The sword was a part of her, so it was not necessary for her to use that in her mental image of the patterns. She could trace through them without holding the sword, and she felt herself doing so.

  After a while of repeating the patterns over and over, she began to see something else. She could see the patterns, even without imagining herself as part of those patterns. It was almost as if she hovered above her body, using patterns to recognize some way to draw power out.

  She opened her eyes. Benji was still talking to Lilah.

  Imogen had gotten lost in the meditation. How long had she been out?

  Long enough for her to feel as if she had connected to some part of herself that she had not before. Like she’d unlocked some piece that was buried deep within her, some part of her that had been trapped, which she could connect to now.

  “Rest,” Benji said, and he glanced over to Imogen as though he knew what she had been doing. “In the morning, we will get moving.”

  Imogen backed up against the stone and closed her eyes for what seemed like only a moment.

  When she opened them again, the sun had already risen. She swept her gaze around, squinting in the light.

  Benji sat next to the remains of the fire. “How did you sleep?” he asked without looking over to her.

  “Dreamless,” she said.

  “Do you fear your dreams?”

  “I don’t fear them, but they are not always restorative.”

  “Dreams can provide guidance,” Benji said.

  “I find dreams to be a nuisance.”

  Imogen got to her feet and stretched. She turned and faced the sun, closing her eyes briefly, then brought her hands together to meditate for only a moment—long enough to clear her mind, ready her body, and prepare for the day ahead.

  When she was done, she turned back to Benji. “Have you been able to uncover anything about the branox?”

  “Did you think I would?”

  “I imagine you spent the night talking to the wind
, the stone, the grass, or even the sky about where they passed.”

  “Do you believe any of those would reveal their presence?”

  When it came to Benji and the kind of power he possessed, none of that was impossible. There were answers in the world tied to his particular connection to magic.

  “I believe they would,” she said.

  “They have been moving,” he said softly, shaking his head. “Relentlessly. I’ve been trying to uncover where they are going, but I can’t see anything in the whispers I hear or the occasional thread I can see of where they are traveling. Only that they’re moving ever farther to the east.”

  “Toward the Leier lands.”

  “Probably.”

  “And once they reach them—”

  “Your people will be in danger,” he said. “Unless they have your skill.”

  Imogen nodded. “Some do.”

  “Not that kind of skill.”

  “Some have more.”

  Benji gave her a small smile. “I think you might be surprised, Imogen.”

  She jerked her head and met his gaze. He didn’t call her by her name often, so when he did, it was enough to surprise her.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I think you have begun to dismiss your own capable nature. And the more you come to recognize just what you can do, the power that’s within you, the more you will appreciate your own potential.”

  “I understand what I do, and I understand what my people can do.” When she had faced the branox, she had not been using her sacred patterns exclusively. She had not needed to. She had primarily been using the traditional patterns. They were powerful enough, especially because they had helped her cut down most of the creatures.

  There were many Firsts of the Blade among her people, enough that she didn’t fear that they wouldn’t be able to cut down the branox. They just had to believe the danger was real.

  “You diminish the truth of yourself,” Benji said. “You diminish the truth of what you have learned.”

  “There are quite a few people among the Leier who have studied longer than I ever did.”

  “Studying longer does not mean studying better. How long were you in your sacred temple?”

  “Three years,” she said.

  “In those three years, did you master any of the sacred patterns?”

  “You know I did not.”

  “And in the time since you left, have you mastered any of them?”

  “Not until recently,” she said.

  Benji nodded, and he looked over to Lilah. “Sometimes it is not the duration of the study but the dedication to the study. In your case, you need experiences to enlighten you, to help you recognize that what you feared was not what you should fear.”

  “You’re saying I wouldn’t be able to understand the sacred patterns without coming to understand sorcery?” Imogen asked.

  “I’m saying that what you fear of magic is not what you should be afraid of. Magic is not evil, it is simply a part of the world. The way you access it is one method.”

  “It is a sacred pattern.”

  “You can call it whatever you must, but I’m telling you that how you access it is but one way. The more you study, the more you become enlightened, the more you will come to see that there are other ways of reaching that power. And when you do, then you can become truly powerful.”

  It wasn’t that she wanted magic. The gods knew that Imogen wanted nothing to do with magic, or at least that was what she had told herself all those years. She wanted nothing to do with magic.

  But she had wanted to know the sacred patterns. And what were they but magic?

  She recognized that there was power within the patterns, even if she couldn’t fully use it. She had started to feel the power within Tree Stands in the Forest, along with Petals in the Wind and several others, but not enough. Certainly not nearly as much as Master Liu knew. He had used magic, after all.

  And it wasn’t that she wanted to reach for magic or call on power. It was more that the sacred patterns had proven themselves useful, especially against creatures she had been forced to face.

  If she was honest with herself—which she increasingly found that she was going to need to do—the sacred patterns were going to be necessary in order to stop her brother.

  “I found myself meditating last night, and visualizing the patterns without me in them,” she told him.

  “I’m sure that was effective.”

  “I don’t really know,” she admitted. “I don’t really know anything about the sacred patterns anymore. I thought I did.”

  “Acknowledging your stupidity is one way to find wisdom.”

  She frowned at him, and Benji barked out a laugh.

  “You aren’t expected to know everything,” he said. “How could you, when you’ve been taught to fear what you must embrace? You need to open yourself up, to recognize that there is something more to the world.”

  If there was one thing she had seen in her time away from the Leier homeland, it was that there was much more to the world than she had known. She thought of something Master Liu had once told her, the way he had described a balance in the world, as if aspects of it hung on a scale. Maybe magic was like that as well.

  “We should wake her,” she said, nodding to Lilah.

  Lilah rubbed sleep from her eyes when she awoke, still gripping the silver necklace. She got to her feet and looked at them both. “Is it morning already?”

  “Morning? We are damn near to the afternoon. The two of you slept too much.”

  Imogen chuckled. “We need to leave. I don’t know how much farther we have to go today, but I suspect we will need to travel quickly.”

  “Only if we want to head them off,” he said.

  “You don’t want to?”

  “Oh, I think we need to. I just wanted to make sure the two of you wanted to.”

  Imogen looked over to Lilah. Now was the chance for the girl to leave. She didn’t have to be a part of this.

  “Why don’t you go back to one of those villages?” Imogen said to her. “Wait there until safety comes.”

  “You think it will?” Lilah asked.

  Imogen shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “Those villages were abandoned. There is no safety there.”

  She understood Lilah’s hesitation. It had nothing to do with her desire to face the branox and everything to do with her fear about facing the unknown alone.

  Imogen worried about her, though. If Lilah didn’t begin to learn real magic from Benji, she may become a hindrance, or worse. It was possible that she would draw the branox to them.

  Around midday, they came across another village, this time on the slopes of a rocky mountainside that would lead them to the Leier homeland. Much like the other villages, this one was empty. They picked through it, looking for anything they might be able to use, but they found nothing. Nothing to explain what had happened here, nothing to explain where the people had gone. Nothing.

  When they left the village, they had to climb up the side of the mountain. Imogen hadn’t been to these lands in a long time, and scaling the rock to find a narrow, winding path reminded her of her childhood. She would go off exploring on her own, between sessions spent training with the sword.

  By evening, Imogen was fatigued from hiking up the mountain. Benji didn’t appear tired at all. His pace remained no different than it had been when they’d first set out. Lilah had slowed, and she was the reason they had begun to move much more sluggishly. They reached a small ledge and paused.

  “Do you know where you are?” Benji asked, looking over to Imogen.

  “I’ve been through the mountains, though not this place in particular.”

  “We are near the Charuth Pass.”

  Could we already have gone that far?

  “Then we’re in the north,” she said. They had reached the mountains faster than she had expected. Did Benji have something to do with it? When they had stepped out of th
e forest only a day or so before, the mountains had still been a long way from them. Now they were so close to their destination.

  And still so far.

  If they were near the pass, then they weren’t in her lands yet.

  “We’re in the north, but it also means something else,” Benji said.

  Imogen frowned, but she realized what he was saying. “The Koral.”

  “Indeed. If they’re moving through here, we must be careful.”

  She looked over to Lilah. They were all tired, and she didn’t know how much longer the girl could climb, but figured that they should push a little farther. No one said anything as they continued up the slope, and it was near dusk when she noticed shadowy shapes moving along the mountainside.

  Soldiers.

  Not Leier soldiers but Koral.

  She motioned to the other two.

  Benji slowed and crouched down, sweeping his gaze around him before sniffing at the air. “Something is unusual.”

  “Other than encountering the Koral here?”

  “Other than that,” he said. “It is… shit.”

  He pointed, and Imogen noted a blur. The darkness made it difficult for her to make it out. She didn’t need to see much, though.

  These were branox.

  And they were attacking the Koral.

  Chapter Thirteen

  A strange blur appeared around the branox as they moved, nothing like how they looked in death. The air crackled, the same way as it had when they had fought in the forest, and Imogen knew that she had to do something.

  The creatures were crawling atop the rock, but that wasn’t what bothered her. It was more about how they were moving toward the Koral. Toward people she had been trained to hate, to destroy.

  But then, she had been trained to want to destroy sorcerers as well.

  “We found them,” she said, looking over to Benji.

  The Koral shamans had power, but she had never known how much. She had suspected that it was more like enchanter magic than that of the Society, but they had to possess considerable power to draw the branox to them.

  Benji crawled forward, running his hand along the stone of the mountainside, tracing a faint pattern. He stood in the open, a deep frown creasing his brow, and he wrinkled his nose as he sniffed the air again.