A Traitor in Skyhold: Mage Errant Book 3

by John Bierce

  “So… what does it actually do?” Sabae asked.

  The enchanter gave her an incredulous look. “What?”

  Sabae shrugged. “Our master likes to surprise us. He refused to tell me what the enchantment does.”

  The enchanter just sighed at that. “One of those, huh? My master was the same way.” A sudden grin crossed her face as she finished freeing the shield, then set it on the counter. “So I suppose in that spirit, I should show you what it does, rather than just telling you. Pick it up.”

  Sabae traded excited looks with the others, then she reached out to lift the shield.

  It wouldn’t budge in the slightest.

  Sabae grunted and pulled for a while, then glanced over at Godrick. “Want to give it a try?”

  Godrick cracked his knuckles and smiled. “It would be mah pleasure.”

  The massive apprentice grasped the shield firmly with both hands, then heaved. Sabae could see his face begin to darken with the effort, and she could see the stone counter actually begin to shake before Godrick gave up, gasping for breath.

  The enchanter laughed, then almost casually reached out and picked it up, handing it to Sabae.

  “How…?” Sabae started, turning over the buckler in her hands to inspect it. She noticed that there weren’t any straps on the back, or even places to put them.

  “When you channel mana into the shield, you can make it stick to things,” the enchanter said. “It only sticks to what you want it to stick to, and it’s incredibly mana efficient— I was able to keep it stuck to the counter even with as much force as your friend there was putting into it. Honestly, if he’d put much more effort into it, he probably would have torn off the surface of the counter before the enchantment broke.”

  “How am I supposed to carry it without straps?” Sabae asked.

  “Same thing,” the enchanter said. “Just stick it to your arm. The enchantment has a function built into it to keep from sticking too hard in the wrong places and tearing your skin, which the impact dampening enchantment in the front should help with too. When you’re not using it, just stick it to your back.”

  Sabae did so, and found that the shield would adhere and come loose perfectly, so that it wasn’t uncomfortable or difficult to flex her back, twist, or even bend over.

  “You can selectively stick to whatever you want, and let things go from the shield without releasing everything else,” the enchanter said. “It’s got a surprisingly far range for channeling mana into it— a good couple of hundred feet, though control of it gets worse with distance— and other mages can’t channel mana into it while you are. That last is pretty standard for most magical items, but this one actually takes it a step further— after you use it regularly for at least a couple of months, it should begin to attune to you, to the point where other mages won’t be able to use it at all. Once it’s attuned to you, it can probably go a solid year or two before anyone else will be able to use it. It’s a handy little enchantment, though it’s not often used, thanks to its complexity.”

  Sabae could feel a wide smile working across her face.

  “Let’s see if I’m missing anything…” the enchanter muttered, poring over the spellform diagrams. “Oh, right! It’s got its own small built-in mana reservoir, so you can leave it stuck to something, and it will stay there for quite some time. Magic items with their own mana reservoirs are extremely rare, you’re lucky to have it. And it’s all quite intuitive to use. It shouldn’t take too much practice to get used to it.”

  “It’ll be pretty handy for binding up your enemies’ weapons when they attack you with them, at least,” Talia said. Sabae could tell the tattooed redhead was trying to sound casual, but the envious look on her face was pretty obvious.

  Sabae smiled at her buckler. “Oh, I can think of much more interesting uses for it than that already.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Dragon Bones

  Talia glared at the shard of dragon bone lying on the stone slab she used as a table.

  When she’d started working with the dragon bone, she was expecting it to give her much larger explosions.

  She hadn’t gotten them.

  Instead, Ataerg’s bones were actually proving resistant to her magic.

  Talia had spent quite some time poring through the books on bone magic that Alustin had provided for her, and they did seem to have a reputation as being among the most difficult bones to work with, so they weren’t particularly favored for ammunition or other combat uses by bone mages.

  They were, however, highly favored for more long-term use. Bone mages lucky enough (or dangerous enough) to get their hands on dragon bone regularly fashioned it into weapons and armor. It was particularly notorious for holding enchantments well.

  Thankfully, dragons didn’t, for the most part, tend to take offense at humans using dragon bones like this— they liked to keep the bones of their rivals as trophies, and viewed using dragon bones to craft with as a fairly natural extension of that.

  Most of the books still agreed that it was best not to flaunt that you were using dragon bones, however. Better safe than sorry.

  Talia just kept glaring at the shard of Ataerg’s bones. Even the legendary strength of dragon bone hadn’t held up to the impact that killed the ancient wyrm, but that actually made it quite a bit easier for Talia— otherwise, few of the pieces would have been small enough for Talia to carry, let alone work with.

  She picked up the forearm sized shard, looking it over for the twentieth time. About half its thickness was from the surface of the bone— a smooth, thick, opalescent white layer that was almost impregnable. The inner part of the bone was spongy and porous, which Talia imagined helped cut down on weight, though it was already extremely light.

  The inner part looked quite fragile, but she’d earned enough cuts from it to prove otherwise. She’d barely been able to chip it with a hammer, and even Godrick and his sledgehammer had trouble with it.

  A big part of that was likely thanks to Ataerg’s age— dragon bones grew steadily stronger as dragons aged and grew. It slowed over time, but never stopped entirely.

  She shook her head. No point staring at the damn thing all day, might as well try another test.

  Talia retreated from the slab, climbing into the little bunker just across the chamber. There was a thick slab of enchanted glass facing the slab, so she could get a good look at the explosions she was creating without concern. The bunker also had a number of sound dampening enchantments to protect her ears from the noise.

  Talia shook her hair out of her face, then focused on the dragon bone. She visualized the mana channeling spellform, and then began pumping mana into the shard.

  The bone promptly began glowing, but there wasn’t even a hint of growth. She waited a few seconds to be sure, but nothing happened. Talia sighed and began pumping more mana in.

  Finally, the bone shard reached its limit. Dragon bone seemed to have a very strict tolerance for how much of her mana it would accept. And when it reached that limit, it started expelling that heat. Violently.

  Jets of fire gouted out of the bone for a moment, then fizzled out just as quickly.

  It would seem useful, save for the fact that it was largely uncontrollable. And, while Talia had finally found a way to magically produce actual fire, uncontrollably doing so was worse than not doing so at all.

  Fire really wasn’t the sort of thing you wanted uncontrolled.

  Talia sighed and went to go check the bone, just in case anything was different this time.

  Nothing.

  She trudged back to the bunker, then started to pump mana into the bone again. She was currently trying to determine the exact mana capacity of dragon bone, which required pumping mana in slow increments.

  She’d tried a few different ways of channeling mana into bones so far. The first time she’d succeeded at using her bone affinity— well, managed to blow a giant crab up with it— she’d accomplished it via just flooding the mana through her sp
ellform tattoos. It had worked, but it had been really messy.

  It had also been incredibly painful.

  No one had figured out exactly what part of her tattoos was causing many of the strange interactions with her bone affinity— her tattoos had literally dozens of functions, ranging from enhancing the power of her fire spells, to increasing her control, to even boosting the range of her affinity senses.

  If she had actually had a fire affinity, she would have been truly terrifying. All of her brothers had fire affinities, as did both of her parents, so she should have been a safe bet as well.

  She hadn’t been.

  Still, if she had, she never would have come to Skyhold, or met Sabae, Godrick, and Hugh, or gotten the opportunities to blow up a pirate ship or kill a…

  Talia shook her head. It was best not to obsess too much about secrets, unless you wanted to accidentally expose them.

  One of the planned functions of her tattoos had been to let her cast a limited number of fire spells without spellforms— Alustin was fairly sure that was how she’d managed to charge the bones with mana in the first place. It was an unintended use, but it worked, unlike almost every actual bone spellform she’d tried. They usually just collapsed, uncontrollably starting fires.

  It really needed to be reiterated that successful fire mages were not fans of anything uncontrolled or chaotic. They were fans of things that were explosive and destructive, certainly, but doing anything uncontrolled was a great way to maim or kill yourself when it came to fire magic.

  Based off the way Alustin had explained it to her, when the body converted raw mana from the aether into attuned mana, it fundamentally altered the properties of the mana. It still behaved like a liquid for every known affinity, but there were major changes to mana’s analogues to density, viscosity, and the like, based off what affinity the mana had been attuned to.

  That didn’t even go into all the properties mana had that didn’t correspond to any natural fluid whatsoever, but no one had ever come up with a better analogy for mana’s behavior.

  After the mana was converted, the body could store it for quite some time, though it would leak away eventually. In order to cast spells, the mana had to be forced into certain patterns of flow, which caused the attuned mana to react, converting to energy in the form of spells. Spellforms did this explicitly and reliably. Formless casting was the art of forcing the mana to move in the necessary patterns with your will alone— it could be done, but it required singular focus and strength of will, and it was still usually less precise and controllable. The speed of casting and raw power you got in return was usually considered worth it, however.

  Her tattoos were trying to help her body convert the aether into fire mana— but since her body wasn’t actually converting aether into fire mana, it forced a number of non-standard properties onto her bone and dream mana. Spellforms for a particular attunement were usually built to work with the quirks of that type of mana— forcing the wrong type of mana into it usually forced it to fail. And, since her mana didn’t match any other known type, her spellforms tended to fail quite badly, especially with her bone mana.

  Her altered dream mana wasn’t nearly so much of a problem— dream mana was capable of replicating the behavior of quite a few other types of mana, so its spellforms tended towards the robust. Talia was much less versatile than most dream mages, but she definitely wasn’t complaining, since she could produce dreamfire more easily and in much larger quantities than other dream mages.

  Her bone mana, though… no one had ever run into anything like it. None of the bone mages at Skyhold had been the slightest bit of use in figuring it out, and they’d repeatedly taken that out on her, claiming it was just her failing as a student. The others might think it odd that Alustin wasn’t turning to any bone mages to help her, but Talia was actually glad of it.

  It was still a challenge, though. She’d found a couple of very basic mana channeling spells that worked for charging bones, but any spellforms more complex were beyond her. Spellform improvisation and construction like Hugh did wasn’t much use, either— the ability to construct spellforms was based off understanding the specific properties of the mana type in question and adapting the spellform to work with it. Formless casting didn’t work around that— it actually required a much greater understanding of the properties of the mana in question, since you could do magic via spellform using simple rote memorization, or even just carrying pictures of spellforms in a spellbook. Most affinities had histories going back centuries or millennia, so their properties were well understood.

  Talia had none of that. Her weird bone affinity had no history, no tradition to draw from, nothing. Any understanding about the properties of its mana, any spells— she’d most likely have to figure them out herself, and then record them in case anyone else developed something like her attunement.

  Which was unlikely. Unique attunements like hers were extremely rare, but they did happen— and then usually never happened again.

  If there had been someone else, maybe they’d know a way to make using her affinity stop hurting. Using the spellforms worked better than forcing it through her tattoos, but using her bone affinity more than a handful of times in a day began getting painful quickly. Not enough to stop her, or even slow her down, but it certainly wasn’t pleasant.

  She wasn’t going to complain to anyone— not about the pain and not about the fact that she didn’t really have anyone to turn to for help. She could handle it without anyone’s help. But sometimes…

  Talia shook herself out of her fugue. She’d run around that mental bush more times than she could count, and any answers she thought she was chasing around it had long since fled. She needed to finish this round of experiments before dinner.

  She blinked in surprise. She’d spaced off for at least a couple of minutes, and the bone was still glowing— it hadn’t expelled the heat at all.

  Now that was interesting.

  Talia quickly donned the thick flame-resistant suit that hung in the bunker. The glass facemask was enchanted the same way the bunker window was, and spellforms were sewn into the thick leather of the suit. It was hot, uncomfortable, and smelly, but if there was one thing Talia respected, it was fire.

  She had worried that the bone shard might expel its heat while she was putting the suit on, but it was still glowing strong by the time she finished.

  Talia approached it carefully, in case it was about to jet flame like in the past tests. It… seemed stable, though.

  She carefully pulled off one glove and reached out. She could feel the heat rolling off the shard even from a foot away. Much closer and it actually got painful just having her hand there.

  Talia retreated back to the bunker and cast a simple temperature gauge cantrip on the bone shard. The cantrip didn’t actually directly measure the bone’s temperature— it instead tried to match the temperature of a shielded thermometer in the bunker to the temperature of whatever she cast the cantrip on.

  The readings were always a bit off, since her tattoo messed up cantrips as well— they were prone to setting things on fire, or at least heating them up, but Alustin had helped her precisely calibrate how much her cantrip increased the temperature reading by, so she could account for that easily enough.

  A smile threatened to split her face in half. She considered running to find the others in order to tell them about her discovery, but decided against it. Hugh was getting ridiculous again as Midwinter and Avah’s next visit drew closer. He spent half his time moping and worrying that Avah was going to suddenly decide she wasn’t interested anymore, and the other half being unbearably excited and cheerful about the upcoming visit.

  Either way, he hardly talked about anything else.

  Talia didn’t dislike Avah, she just didn’t think she was right for Hugh.

  She shook her hair out of her eyes again. Besides, there was an excellent reason not to tell her friends about her discovery just yet— surprising people with new ways to destroy
things was even more entertaining than destroying things.

  Well, no, that was a lie. Destroying things was definitely more fun. The surprise thing was a close second, though.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Obsidian

  Hugh had been surprised to find out that he was not going to be the one meeting Rutliss the Red— instead, he’d been scheduled to meet Abyla Ceutas.

  Sabae had been pleased by the idea, though.

  “We’d be deliberately running our ship onto the rocks if you met with Rutliss and I met with Abyla,” Sabae had told him. “She hates my family, and Rutliss hates Kanderon. Either way, it doesn’t seem plausible that we’re trying to convince them to change their votes if we’re antagonizing them.”

  “But we’ve been mainly focusing on…” Hugh had started.

  “You’ve read all of the suspect dossiers, haven’t you?” Sabae interrupted. “It will be fine.”

  Judging by Abyla’s office alone, her family was the kind of wealthy that loved to rub their wealth in your face, yet abhorred ostentation. There was nothing in the way of gaudy ornamentation or obvious displays of wealth. Instead, it came out in the quality of her desk and chairs and the elegance of the wall-hangings.

  That was the third thing you noticed when you walked into Abyla’s office.

  The second thing you noticed was the back wall. Or, rather, the lack of a back wall. Abyla’s office had a waist high retaining wall, but above that, it was simply open to the Endless Erg behind her. From this high up the mountain, the view stretched on seemingly forever. Hugh could spot at least a dozen ships sailing the desert, looking like insects from this high up and far away.

  Another might not have paid them attention, but there was a fairly intricate ward along the top of the retaining wall, though Hugh couldn’t quite make out what it did from here.

  The first thing you noticed were the floor, walls, and ceiling of Abyla’s office. She’d fused them all into solid obsidian. The obsidian seemed to glow from within as the desert sun hit it, giving the office a strange, jewel-like shimmer. Even the retaining wall was crafted out of pure obsidian.