A Traitor in Skyhold: Mage Errant Book 3

by John Bierce

  “It’s trickier than it sounds,” Godrick said to Sabae. “Illusion magic was not intended fer use with stone. It took years fer Da ta’ figure out. Plus, there’s a bunch more ta the armor than just that— yeh got to deal with makin’ sure yer joints move, makin’ sure yeh can breathe and see without decreasin’ yer protection too much, so on and so forth. It’s not just a matter a’ memorizin’…”

  Hugh groaned loudly, and Godrick reached back and patted Hugh on the leg sympathetically. Sabae threw Hugh’s pillow back to Talia, who began mock-smothering him with it.

  “It’s not just a matter a’ memorizin’ a few spellforms,” Godrick continued. “Constructin’ the armor is a whole ordeal every time. Plus yeh need ta practice mana layering ta move the armor properly, and ah’m nowhere near as good as yeh are at that.”

  “When do you think you’ll be able to do the whole suit?” Talia asked, ignoring Hugh saying something about Avah beneath the pillow.

  “Definitely by the time we’ve got ta enter the labyrinth,” Godrick said.

  Hugh groaned even louder at that one.

  “Which hopefully we’ll do in a different labyrinth,” Sabae added. “Is the gorgon labyrinth still the one Alustin is talking about?”

  “Yep,” Godrick said.

  “Anyone have any more clues about what the gorgon incident was?” Talia asked.

  Everyone shook their heads at that one.

  “Hugh, you need to seduce the truth about the gorgon incident out of Avah,” Sabae said.

  Hugh was silent for a moment beneath the pillow and then muttered something incomprehensible. Talia sighed and picked up the pillow. “What was that?”

  “Avah wasn’t on the Owl during the gorgon incident,” Hugh said, then pulled the pillow back down onto his face.

  “Well, Godrick, it looks like it’s up to you then. You need to seduce the truth out of Irrick,” Sabae said.

  Godrick saluted her.

  All of Hugh’s worrying, thankfully, turned out to have been unnecessary. The Owl hadn’t even come to a full halt before Avah vaulted off the side. Hugh frantically began a levitation spellform, but a thin ribbon of sand rose up and caught Avah, gently lowering her down to Hugh.

  “That’s new,” Sabae said.

  “Avah and Hugh being annoying in public?” Talia muttered.

  Hugh made a rude gesture in Talia’s direction, as talking was a bit difficult for him at the moment.

  The gangplank had already been lowered by the time Hugh got a chance to catch a breath, and Irrick was striding down it.

  “Show off,” Irrick said to Avah. “She’s been doing that nonstop since she learned how.”

  “What, kiss Hugh?” Avah said. “You’re just jealous.”

  Irrick rolled his eyes. “No, the sand ribbon. No offense, Hugh, but I prefer a bit of height.”

  “None taken,” Hugh said, still a little out of breath.

  “I will take one page out of Avah’s book, though,” Irrick said as he reached Godrick.

  It took a solid hour for them to get away— Irrick and Avah had to help prepare the ship for unloading, and Captain Solon, Deila, and many of the crew-members wanted to say hello to the students, but they eventually all managed to escape.

  The six of them went to eat at one of the cafes near the dock that specialized in meat pastries. This led to the usual round of jokes about Hugh’s obsession with baked goods, like whenever they visited.

  Hugh was too busy eating a pastry to dignify that with a response.

  “How did you know we were arriving today?” Irrick asked. “Were you just checking the lists every day to see? That’s quite flattering.”

  “The lists?” Talia asked.

  “Skyhold scryers monitor all approaching ships and post lists of their projected arrival times every day,” Sabae said. She had her finger stuck in her mug of water, which was spinning rapidly. “It’s standard practice at most large ports. And no, Alustin told us.”

  Irrick and Avah just nodded at that, as though nothing Alustin did would surprise them.

  Which, honestly…

  Hugh attempted a joke about that, but only managed to spray a few crumbs.

  “Could someone elbow Hugh for me to remind him not to talk with his mouth full of pastry?” Talia asked.

  Avah and Sabae, sitting on either side of Hugh, promptly both complied. Which in turn resulted in the spraying of considerably more pastry crumbs.

  Hugh managed to swallow most of the mouthful by the time everyone else was done laughing.

  “Hugh!” a voice called out from behind him.

  Hugh froze. He literally could not think of a worse time to run into Rhodes than with Avah here. Normally, he’d be fine just running, but…

  Without missing a beat, Sabae turned, pulling her hand out of her mug. The water came with it, rapidly spinning around her hand.

  She blasted it straight behind Hugh.

  No one spoke for a moment, though everyone but Hugh was looking behind him. Several people at nearby tables were giggling. Hugh could hear water dripping behind him.

  “I just want to talk!” Rhodes called.

  “Hugh doesn’t want to talk to you,” Sabae replied. She stuck her hand into Hugh’s water mug.

  “I…” Rhodes started.

  Before he could finish, Sabae pulled the water out of Hugh’s mug and sent it blasting towards Rhodes again.

  Rhodes coughed and spat for several moments. The giggles around them had grown quite a bit louder.

  “Fine, whatever!” Rhodes yelled. Hugh could hear him stomping off. And dripping.

  Hugh slowly relaxed as the others turned away from Rhodes. He took another bite of his pastry so he wouldn’t have to talk to anyone.

  “An ex you haven’t told me about yet, Hugh?” Avah asked.

  Hugh spat out quite a few crumbs coughing at that.

  “Definitely not,” Talia said. “Enemy would be a much better description.”

  “Can we not talk about Rhodes right now?” Hugh asked.

  The conversation switched to Sabae’s water blasts after that. Sabae was progressing quicker with her study of water magic than she had with her wind magic, which was apparently quite common. Water, along with stone, was supposed to be one of the easiest affinities to learn and attune, at least at first.

  Everyone else seemed to be having a good time, but Hugh couldn’t quite shake off the mood that Rhodes had left him in.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Sand, Stone, and Crystal

  The Owl, unfortunately, was only staying at Skyhold overnight— long enough to unload and load their cargos and replenish their supplies.

  Captain Solon (or his mother Deila— Hugh had never entirely been sure who was actually in charge of the ship) had, at least, given Avah and Irrick leave from having to help.

  The group spent a lot of their limited time wandering about Skyhold’s harbor. Hugh had spent as much free time as possible exploring it, but he’d not even come close to seeing everything there. Sabae, Talia, and Godrick all knew it a lot better than he did, but then they hadn’t been manipulated into spending literally all their time inside the mountain by a demon last year.

  Avah found it surprising that Hugh knew so little about Skyhold’s exports— while it was a major source of income for Skyhold, the Academy was a good ways down from being the biggest source. Skyhold, like Theras Tel, provided water for visiting ships via an almost identical water pumping system. The major difference, apparently, was that the granite of Skyhold left the water slightly toxic, so a large contingent of water mages remained on duty to purify it at all times.

  Even more important than that were the exports from the labyrinth— rare magical reagents, materials, and living creatures that couldn’t be found anywhere but in labyrinths. Hugh had known about the labyrinth’s profitability, but he hadn’t even come close to understanding exactly how profitable it was.

  Avah actually seemed disappointed she couldn’t visit the labyrinth
, though even Irrick thought that was a little crazy.

  Hugh grew more and more nervous as the day went on, thinking about Kanderon’s well intentioned— if mutually embarrassing— discussion with him. At the end of the night, however, Avah merely kissed him goodnight and headed back towards the ship.

  He couldn’t help but feel irritated at his emotions, for not being able to make up their minds about whether he should feel relieved or disappointed.

  The next morning, they all met up again at a dockside cafe for breakfast. Avah arrived looking singularly pleased.

  “Guess what, Hugh!” she said, hugging him hard enough to make his ribs creak. She continued before he could hazard any guesses. “Grandmother and Alustin have made plans for me and Irrick to visit again! We’re going to be here for a whole month.”

  Irrick looked somewhat pleased, but mostly just tired as he rolled his eyes at Avah. “For a month around Midwinter,” he said. “We’re not staying just yet.”

  They sat at a table right on the edge of the harbor, and Avah amused herself during breakfast by trying to control her silverware with a tendril of sand.

  Hugh, of course, promptly got sand in his food.

  With a little effort, he was able to devise a simple spell to pull out much of the sand— it was a fairly simple variant on a levitation spell, which was one of Hugh’s specialties. He had to recast it several times, targeting a different type of crystal each time. Quartz first, followed by feldspar, followed by various types he couldn’t name after that.

  When he took a bite, however, he could still feel sand in his egg scramble.

  Godrick yawned, then cast a spell— apparently intended to clean up rock dust— to remove the rest of the sand from Hugh’s plate.

  Hugh frowned at his plate thoughtfully.

  After they saw the Owl off, a process that involved Avah delighting in embarrassing Hugh again, as well as Hugh’s spellbook somehow sneaking into Captain Solon’s cabin and trying to eat the ship’s logs, they all hurried to meet Alustin for their morning training.

  Alustin might be a harsh taskmaster, but he was fairly forgiving about them being late this time. Not entirely forgiving, however— today he took them outside Skyhold to run in the desert sand.

  As usual, Alustin lectured them while they ran— today on mage tactics in large battles. Generally mages stood either in the back of the lines, firing spells at range, or spread through the ranks, helping maintain windshields or alternative defenses for the army. The trick was matching the drain on the aether by an army’s mages with the density of the local aether— if you used too much, you were liable to leave the local aether and your mages mana reservoirs drained, with the opposing force’s mana reservoirs still intact.

  While the four of them were exhausted— Alustin had even forbidden Godrick to use his sand hardening spell while they ran— Alustin didn’t even seem out of breath as he lectured. And he was jogging backward so he could face them, at that.

  Hugh, however, was having trouble focusing on Alustin’s instruction. He kept thinking back to the sand at breakfast.

  Finally, to his own surprise, he interrupted Alustin. To Alustin’s surprise as well, apparently, because the paper mage tripped and fell, though he was back on his feet almost immediately.

  “Why can Avah, Godrick, and I all affect sand?” Hugh asked.

  “What do you mean?” Alustin said, brushing sand off of himself, and gradually coming to a halt.

  The apprentices stopped gratefully, and Talia immediately flopped down into the sand, despite her oft-proclaimed dislike of it.

  Hugh related the story of the sand in his food. “One of the first things you get taught when you arrive is that the boundaries between affinities are blurry, and that mages in adjacent affinities will often be able to challenge one another for control of a material. This morning, though, it really started to bug me for the first time. Why are affinities so… blurry? Shouldn’t they be better defined?”

  Alustin smiled, sat down, and picked up a handful of sand. He slowly let it trickle between his fingers. Hugh, Godrick, and Sabae all took his lead and sat down as well, and Talia sat up.

  “I was wondering when one of you would ask a question like that,” Alustin said. “It is, it seems, time to let you in on a few truths about the nature of magic.”

  Hugh and the others exchanged confused glances.

  “Can anyone tell me what sand is?” Alustin asked.

  Everyone just stared at him, until Godrick finally ventured an answer. “It’s just… bits a’ rock?”

  “Gravel’s just bits of rock,” Alustin said, “and you don’t see that many gravel mages, do you?”

  Hugh had never even heard of any gravel mages.

  “It’s… really small bits of rock?” Sabae guessed.

  “Pick up a handful,” Alustin said, “and really look at it closely. Feel it. Grains of sand are small, but they’re not that small.”

  Hugh did so. He also extended his crystal affinity sense into the handful of sand, feeling all the different types of crystal in it. Lots of quartz, a bit of feldspar, a variety of other bits. A decent number of non-crystalline grains were scattered throughout as well.

  “So… sand is just small bits of rock in a particular size range?” Hugh asked.

  “Essentially,” Alustin said, picking up another handful of sand.

  They all waited for him to elaborate or explain, but Alustin seemed content to just wait.

  “That’s stupid,” Talia finally said. “Why would there just be an affinity for rock bits of a particular size? There’s got to be more to it than that.”

  “More to sand?” Alustin said. “I mean, there’s lots more— figuring out where the grains eroded from, how they were transported to their location, whether they were weathered by wind or water…”

  “You know what I mean,” Talia interrupted, narrowing her eyes at Alustin. “There’s got to be more to the nature of sand and sand affinities than that.”

  Alustin considered for a moment. “Do you mean something along the lines of a magical energy signature specific to sand, that people naturally gravitate towards and resonate with, resulting in them gaining sand affinities? Or perhaps some higher realm of reality where an ideal version of sand exists, with all actual sand and sand affinities all referring back to this ideal sand, along with ideal versions of everything else?”

  “Exactly,” Talia said.

  “No,” Alustin said.

  Talia spluttered in frustration, while he just kept playing with sand.

  “So it’s just a variant of a stone affinity, then?” Sabae said. “Sand affinities just tap into that magical signature for stone, but something happens that makes them just affect stone bits of a particular size?”

  Alustin idly threw a handful of sand in Sabae’s direction, though it fell far short. “Not at all. Stone doesn’t have any sort of magical energy signature identifying it as stone either, nor is there any ideal version of stone found in another realm. There is absolutely no material, so far as we can tell, that has anything of the sort. Not stone, not wood, not fire, not water, and not shadow.”

  “Then how do mah affinity senses know I’m lookin’ at stone?” Godrick asked. “There’s got ta be some way they identify it.”

  Alustin reclined back in the sand. “Now you’re getting closer to the right question,” he said. “Still not quite there, though. Recall how the aether is always unattuned mana? Storms increase aether density, but it’s not wind mana. Volcanoes do it too, but it’s not magma, stone, or fire mana. Any phenomena that releases large amounts of energy does it— earthquakes, forest fires, blizzards, and the like— yet none of them ever produce attuned mana. Mana is only attuned inside living things.”

  “Ship,” Sabae said.

  “What about enchanted items?” Godrick asked.

  “Well, yes, some enchanted items do it as well, but those are built by living things, it doesn’t happen naturally,” Alustin said.

  �
�There’s a ship coming this way, we should probably move,” Sabae said.

  A couple minutes of undignified scrambling up a nearby dune later, they resumed the lecture, albeit while watching the sandship cruise towards the port.

  Hugh used this opportunity to take his spellbook off. Even with the proprioceptive link, it was quite heavy.

  “So are you trying to tell us that affinities are just nonsense people make up?” Talia asked, looking dubious.

  Alustin shook his head. “Not at all. It’s somewhat tricky to explain, but if you’ll permit me to tell you a story, it might help.”

  “Better a story than more running in sand,” Talia muttered.

  Alustin ignored that and continued. “Around six hundred years ago, the Ithonian Emperor Dulius grew interested in the question of how people gained their affinities. He funded a grand research program employing hundreds of mages and scholars. Many were frauds seeking wealth, but Dulius was no fool, and he quickly weeded them out. He was also far from kind, so the example he set of them was, by all accounts, quite effective at deterring others from trying to fool him.”

  “After ten years, the effort had come up with only two solid conclusions. First, what I’ve just told you— that materials did not seem to possess any sort of unique magical essence, signal, resonance, or anything else that led to attunement. That conclusion caused significant, and sometimes even bloody, dissent among the researchers.”

  “The second conclusion was viewed as something of a curiosity at first, but it quickly grew to be the primary focus when efforts to disprove the first conclusion failed. Essentially, some of the researchers had found that affinity distribution by population varied wildly across the known world. One region would tend to have a whole different proportion of, say, fire mages to wood mages, while another might have almost none of either and a preponderance of gravity mages.”

  Alustin’s expression had lost its humor at this point. “This was the beginning of the nastiest period of Ithonian history, leading up to their fall. Their findings led to many in the empire claiming that this difference in affinity distribution between regions was an indicator of how worthy the civilizations residing in them were. Unsurprisingly, they began to declare that this proved that the Ithonians were truly the worthiest civilization and people.”