by Rowe, Andrew
“Simple can be effective,” Lydia pointed out. “If it looks like we’re executing a symbol of the Tae’os faith, it’s hard to believe they wouldn’t respond to that.”
“In that case, it’s best to not give them what they want. We should recapture the man, but simply keep him prisoner, rather than have him executed.” Sethridge steepled his fingers.
“I’m not sure Myros will agree to that.” Morella frowned. “But we can try to convince him. The sooner we retrieve the prisoner, the easier that will be.”
“And how will we ensure he doesn’t escape a second time?” Lydia asked, trying to come across as if she was contributing their planning.
Sethridge shrugged. “Sorcery typically requires a tongue.”
Taelien’s doesn’t – his style of casting is more similar to Jonan’s. And he had access to a dominion I had never seen before. A second bond, stronger than his bond to metal. She still hadn’t quite sorted out what it was.
“Yes, let’s cut out his tongue. That’s not going to antagonize anyone,” Morella said, her voice dripping with acid.
“I take your point,” Sethridge rolled his eyes. “Fine, fine. We’ll just use rope next time, and put more guards in his room. Sorcery does not confer invincibility.”
“All right. I’ll see if I can figure out another spell I can use to track him or the sword. If the two of you find anything clues about him, please let me know immediately.” Lydia stood up, nodding to each of the other sorcerers. “I will inform you if I discover anything.”
“Very well, then, Scryer. I wish you Rialla’s luck,” Sethridge said, a mild smile twisting his lips. His smile was twice as unsettling as his accusations had been.
“I will pray that I do not need it,” Lydia replied.
They were the truest words she had spoken in nearly a day.
The sorceress made a cursory effort to search the palace, including visiting Captain Randal to ask basic questions about the prisoner. She also tried to determine Istavan’s current location, but it seemed like no one had encountered him since “Istavan” left with Lydia the night before.
Interesting. Seems like Istavan is up to something of his own. She wasn’t quite sure if that would be beneficial to her yet. If Istavan had gone to the others and claimed that she had attacked him, at least she could have dealt with that confrontation directly. His absence saved her trouble for the moment, but she knew it could prove a greater problem later.
With that in mind, she checked the armory for any clues about what might have happened to Istavan after their battle. The weapons and items within inside were sorted neatly – all signs of the fight had been removed, and she found no traces of additional sorcery.
I’ll need to investigate this more later, she considered, but for now, I have more pressing matters to attend to.
Lydia knocked soundly on the door to Jonan’s borrowed home. Her left hand adjusted her scabbard, her right hand drifting to the hilt to prepare to draw – just in case she was wandering into a trap.
The door swung open, revealing a somewhat disheveled looking Jonan on the other side. “It’s late,” he mumbled. He waved his hand in a loose gesture of welcome. “Come in.”
Lydia didn’t release the grip on her sword until after Jonan had moved out of the way, giving her a better view of the room. Even then, she reminded herself that he could have been hiding any number of invisible attackers. “Dominion of Knowledge, illuminate the hidden,” she said as she stepped inside. When no assassins manifested, she nodded to herself and released her grip on the weapon.
“Not very trusting, are you?” Jonan remarked. “Close the door, if you wouldn’t mind.”
Lydia shrugged at his comment, turning and closing the door, and then noting a lock and turning it into position. “You shouldn’t be, either. When you opened the door, it could have been anyone on the other side.”
“I looked through the door before I opened it,” he said, tapping on his glasses meaningfully.
“You have a spell for that?” Lydia perked up in spite of herself. Seeing through objects would be a tremendously useful skill to have.
“Sure,” Jonan said. “It’s just a different application of the same spell that makes me invisible, really.”
Lydia raised an eyebrow dubiously. “That should have made the door invisible to me as well, then, unless you added some sort of key to it.”
“Key? Ptah. You Velryan sorcerers are so inflexible. Always trying to codify things that are easily mutable,” Jonan remarked with a grin.
Lydia folded her arms. “Incantations and keys allow for greater precision. They’re tools for conceptualizing and memorizing things that are difficult to break down into component parts at the time when a spell is cast.”
“Less like tools, more like crutches,” Jonan said with a half-shrug.
“That attitude is why Kesites make great assassins, but Velryans win wars,” Lydia shot back, pushing up her own glasses.
“Oh, which wars exactly? Nevermind – that’s not important,” Jonan said, suddenly shaking his head.
“You’re right,” Lydia said. She added abruptly, “I want you to show me that spell, though. Would you be willing to cast it on me?”
“Why?” Jonan said, quirking a brow. “You won’t perceive any difference.”
Lydia tapped on her left arm. “I’m a sorcerer, too, you know. I have my ways. And don’t try to cast something else – I’ll know.”
“Ahh,” Jonan said, nodding in acknowledgement. “A knowledge sorceress, yes. Of course you’d want me to cast it on you. Very well.”
And, with a nonchalant wave of Jonan’s hand, Lydia was bombarded.
Eyes close. Erase target in mind. Sustain image; target self. Open eyes.
Her Comprehensive Barrier spell had been triggered, as she knew it would be – but the results were far from typical. Usually, she was presented with the name of the dominion of the spell, the name of the spell, and any keys that were used to modify the effect. It seemed that Jonan’s method of sorcery was so distinct from her own that the Dominion of Knowledge itself reacted – and stored the information – differently. Perhaps what she was seeing was a transcription of Jonan’s own thoughts – conscious or unconscious – as he had cast the spell. She had no way of knowing.
She did note immediately, however, that a gesture with a hand was not one of the steps. Was that just a dismissive gesture and not part of the spell itself? Or was it a method that Jonan used to focus, similar to her own incantations?
She would ask another time, if at all – for the moment, she preferred to give Jonan as little information on what she had gathered as possible.
“Huh,” she said.
“Huh,” Jonan replied in kind. “That’s never happened.”
Lydia tilted her head to the side. “What’s never happened?”
“You’re not invisible – the spell didn’t work.” Jonan said. His eyes brightened after a moment. “Protective sorcery?”
Lydia nodded.
“Fascinating. I’ve never seen protective sorcery that can block a Sight spell before. It’s unintuitive that it could even be possible – my spell should be affecting my senses, rather than actually changing you in any way.”
“Perhaps it prevented your spell from even targeting me properly,” Lydia speculated aloud. She was equally intrigued – she had expected the spell to be blocked, but that was without a full knowledge of how it worked.
Now that she had comprehended his methodology for casting the spell, a few moments of consideration gave her something of an answer – his second step was “erasing” the target mentally. That’s the problem – he’s unintentionally hiding the target from himself, rather than making himself unable to perceive the target. I could tell him that, but if I help him improve his methods too much, he might end up erasing me later – in a more permanent sense. Hrm.
This process had told her something important above and beyond the fundamentals of the spell itself – Jonan
’s style of casting was alarmingly different from how she had been taught. She knew that the western school of sorcery had a different methodology – she had been taught all about it in her earliest classes. “Assassin’s sorcery”, as the students called it, was ridiculed for its inefficiency, informality, and ineffectiveness.
She doubted any of the students – or any of the teachers – had met someone like Jonan. His level of ability to manipulate the parameters of a single spell helped put the mocked nickname of his school into context.
Assassin’s sorcery. Lydia wondered if, perhaps, she had underestimated what it meant to be an assassin.
“Hungry?” Jonan asked.
Lydia blinked, startled out of her reverie. “No, not really, thank you.”
“Well, just come sit with me, then,” he gestured to a chair by the table. “We have a great deal to discuss.”
Jonan made his way to the table, and Lydia followed, her head still swimming with the memory of foreign thoughts.
Lydia sat a moment after Jonan did, a consideration forcing itself to the forefront of her mind. “Where’s Taelien?”
“A good question,” Jonan remarked, stabbing a bite of meat on the table with his fork. “Bodily, he’s up in the guest bedroom. Mentally, I’m not really clear on that.”
The sorceress raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”
“We had, um, a bit of an incident while we were investigating the bank,” Jonan started, fidgeting with the food on his fork. “To trim the epic ballad to a manageable length, Taelien ended up punching an Esharen to death and we fled with great haste.”
Lydia furrowed her brow so deeply that her glasses slid half an inch down her nose. “...What?”
Jonan shrugged. “It did take him several punches. To elaborate briefly, we actually fled with the unconscious Esharen draped over our shoulders – very awkward – but it expired quickly upon our arrival here. He’s been upstairs moping ever since.”
In an effort to collect herself, Lydia straightened her glasses and sat up in her chair. An Esharen this far east? That can’t be a good sign. She had heard that some scant few Esharen had escaped the fall of their capital city, but any sane survivor would not have ventured anywhere close to human territory. Which means someone probably hunted this one down intentionally and brought it here.
“One of the founding principles of your order involved hunting the Esharen,” Lydia noted. “What does it say to you that one of them was in Orlyn?”
“As a point of note, I’m not actually a member of the Order of Vaelien. I simply work with them. That said, this was once an Esharen city, as I’m sure you know. It’s plausible that there could be Esharen still living somewhere in the area. That said, I find it more likely that the Esharen we found was...imported. We discovered the creature imprisoned in a ritual barrier utilizing a type of sorcery I did not recognize – and I assure you, I recognize many types of sorcery.”
Lydia quirked a brow at that. “What did it look like? Can you describe it?”
“I can do better,” Jonan grinned. He reached into a pouch on his left hip and retrieved a mirror, sliding it across the table to her. After that, he finally took a bite of the meat on his fork while Lydia picked up the mirror.
The image that stared back from the glass was not her face, but the body of an obsidian-scaled beast, encircled by arcane markings.
“Huh.” Lydia held the mirror closer to her face, squinting at the markings, but they were unrecognizable. Not due to the small size of the image, she recognized to her chagrin – they were simply foreign. “Neat trick with the mirrors.”
Jonan simply nodded, continuing to eat while she set the mirror down.
It’s more than a neat trick, she realized. It’s a core element of his strategy, and he’s handed it to me without asking for anything in exchange. I’ve been cooperating very poorly by comparison, treating both Jonan and Taelien like threats rather than allies. I made my choice the moment I broke Taelien out. I need to commit to that.
“And, um, about that spell you cast on me before,” Lydia said with a hint of hesitation.
“Hm?” Jonan looked up, still chewing.
“The spell I used to block your illusion – well, it also gives me information about any spells that it stops. The reason your spell didn’t work was because of how you broke it down into steps – you tried to ‘erase’ my image from your mind. I imagine you thought it was just like putting a dark lens over your eyes, but it was really more like throwing a blanket over me so you couldn’t see me. That’s why it didn’t work,” Lydia rattled off rapidly, unable to stop herself once she had started.
Jonan blinked. “Amazing! Your spell read my intent? That’s – that’s just incredible.” He set his fork down and wrung his hands at her, grinning fiercely. “Do you realize how significant that is? People have been searching for a way to read minds with sorcery for centuries!”
That wasn’t precisely – “The spell was not reading your mind, it was simply translating the portion of your intent that manipulated your sorcery into a format that I could comprehend.”
Jonan shook his head, still grinning. “No, no, it doesn’t matter. It’s a foundation, Lydia. Here, is your spell still operating?”
Lydia nodded, sitting back a bit further, uneasy. “What are you thinking?”
“We should experiment! Here.” Jonan flicked a finger at her, and a rainbow-colored beam shot out, striking her even as she pushed herself backward to dodge.
Shiny beam of colors! Her defensive spell reported in an oddly bright display of text across her vision. Lydia landed on the floor a moment later, her attempt to evade the assault having thrown her from her chair. She winced as her hands caught most of her weight, but the fall was short enough that the pain was merely jarring, not bone-shattering.
“Oh, gods, I’m sorry!” Jonan pushed himself out of his own chair, running around the table to offer her a hand.
“Never do that again,” Lydia said, grabbing his wrist and hauling herself to her feet. She laughed suddenly, startling even herself. “But that was kind of funny.”
The spectacled sorcerer chuckled lightly in reply. “I really am sorry about that,” he said. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. Just warn me a little better before you try to ‘experiment’,” Lydia chided him. “But it wasn’t a bad idea. I’ll admit that I’m used to stopping attacks with this spell, not other types of sorcery. And even then, my sparring partners were always battle sorcerers – and their spells were, if you’ll forgive me, much more structured.”
Jonan nodded while he straightened Lydia’s fallen chair. “It’s not that all my spells are unstructured, but with practice, I’ve learned to create simple effects and manipulate them almost instantly. With greater pre-planning, I can accomplish broader effects, much like I’m sure your sorcerers do. The mirrors are a good example of that.”
“And that thing you just did, the ray of light -,” Lydia began.
“Just an illusion, that’s all,” Jonan explained.
“But an illusion real enough to look like an offensive spell, albeit a strange one. And you had never cast that spell before?” Lydia asked.
Jonan scratched his chin. “Well, not in the sense that I’ve made a multi-colored beam like that before. But it’s really just an image creation spell – the same one I use all the time – being manipulated in a specific way.”
“Fascinating,” Lydia said. “What do you call the spell?”
“Create image,” Jonan replied, nodding sagely.
“That’s not very creative.”
“The creative part comes after I cast it.”
“Ah, yes, shiny beam of colors.”
Jonan blinked again. “You got that from blocking the spell?”
Lydia simply nodded.
“Wow,” he replied. “We’re going to need to do more testing with this.”
Oddly, she agreed with him. I’d love to learn more about how he manipulates his spells
so freely, Lydia realized. That could be a tremendous advantage. And an advantage I never would have had access to if I hadn’t given him some modicum of trust. Hrm.
“That was quite interesting,” Lydia admitted, “But I should really check on Taelien. Do you know why he’s upset?”
Jonan’s expression took a dive toward the grave. “He’s made it perfectly clear. He wanted to rescue the Esharen from captivity. He killed it instead. He thinks he’s some sort of monster now.”
“Esharen are the monsters,” Lydia replied automatically.
“Right,” Jonan agreed, “But he doesn’t see it that way. Apparently growing up with the Rethri made him sympathize with non-humans a bit too much.”
“Huh,” Lydia mumbled, considering. “I’ll be careful about what I say, then.” She gestured to the mirror, “From what the image looks like, that thing was already injured. Maybe we can pin it on that.”
Jonan sighed. “Already tried that. Didn’t take. He said, ‘Is it any better to kill a man by exploiting his already broken arm?’ And I say ‘said’, because it clearly wasn’t a question. If anything, his tone told me that he thought the injuries made it worse.”
Because the injuries gave Taelien what he considered to be an unfair advantage, Lydia realized. The poor child still thinks war is meant to be fair.
“All right,” Lydia said, brushing her bruised hands against her sides. “I’ll try a different angle. Once he’s feeling better, I’ll need to talk to you more about those ritual markings and anything else you found.”
“Of course,” Jonan said. “Good luck up there.”
“Thanks,” Lydia replied. Let’s hope I don’t need it.
Lydia knocked softly on the door to the guest bedroom. “Are you awake in there?”
“Yeah,” replied Taelien’s muted voice.
“Can I come in?” Lydia reflexively brushed her fingers along the hilt of her saber as she waited through several moments of silence.
