by Zales, Dima
Time seemed to slow. She could hear her own ragged breathing and the heavy pumping of her heart. Somewhere at the back of her mind she registered the fact that Ganir swayed on his feet and then sank down to the floor, and that the waves of fear battering her abated slightly.
Struggling to her feet, Augusta approached Ganir’s fallen body to make sure her spell had worked.
Then she began to work on a spell to calm and heal her shattered mind.
Chapter 24: Barson
Barson was doing what he always did when he was angry: channeling it into practice. Three sacks with sand now lay in a shredded mess on the floor, destroyed by his fists, and he was moving on to training with his sword. He knew it was risky, remaining in the Tower, but no sorcerer ever visited the Guard barracks, and Barson needed to let off some steam before he went back to Dara’s house.
Augusta was impossible, he thought between ragged breaths, swinging his sword in a wide, furious arc. He’d had every intention of telling her about his plan, but she’d twisted everything, throwing out accusations that made no sense. And then to imply that he couldn’t protect her because he couldn’t cast spells? He’d always admired her strength and independence, but she took it too far this time. He would not stand for that kind of disrespect—and certainly not from a woman whom he’d wanted to be his companion in the new order.
His intention today was to pass out from exhaustion in this training room, and he was making good headway when the sound of footsteps caught his attention. Turning, he saw Larn walking his way, accompanied by Zanil and Pugan, two of his best lieutenants.
Breathing heavily, Barson lowered his sword. What were they doing in the Tower when they were supposed to stay hidden? Had they come here for exercise as well? “Why are you here?” he yelled as they came closer. “Didn’t I tell you to lie low?”
Strangely, they didn’t respond, just continued walking.
As they got closer, Barson noticed the blank expressions on their faces. Their eyes were glassy and unfocused, as though they were out of their minds with exhaustion or drink. But if that was the case, what were they doing in the training room? And why had they not answered him?
“Larn, stop and explain what’s going on,” Barson commanded. There was no reaction, but Barson could see the muscles in Larn’s right hand tense as his fingers tightened on the hilt of his sword.
This had to be some kind of prank Larn dreamed up. “I am in no mood for levity,” Barson told them sharply. “Explain yourselves. Now.”
They unsheathed their swords instead.
Puzzled and annoyed, Barson assumed a defensive posture out of habit, gripping his sword tighter—and in that moment, they attacked.
They moved with a fury that took him completely by surprise. This was no training.
For some unknown reason, Barson’s best friend and his two trusted soldiers were out to kill him.
Parrying the first thrusts, Barson frantically thought about this situation. There had to be an explanation. “Is someone keeping Dara hostage?” he yelled at Larn, blocking the second wave of attack. “Is that how they are making you do this?”
A cut to his left shoulder was his only answer.
The cut was not deep, but its effect was sobering.
If Barson didn’t focus, he would die.
Chapter 25: Blaise
Entering Liva’s house with Gala, Blaise saw Esther and Maya sitting at the table with their host.
“There you two lovebirds are,” Esther exclaimed with a wide smile on her face. “Liva tells me that was quite a lesson today.”
Gala grinned, her face lighting up. “Liva did a great job with her spell,” she said, looking at the woman.
Liva flushed, both pleased and embarrassed by the praise. “Oh, I’m nowhere near as good as this girl right here . . .” She pointed at Gala. “Now, she’s got real talent.”
“Oh, we know,” Maya said drily. “Believe me, we know.”
“So when is the celebration?” Gala asked, looking excited at the thought. “I’d love to meet everyone.”
“We were just waiting for the two of you to get back,” Liva said, smiling. “Now that you’re here, I’ll let the others know, and we can start.”
* * *
Everybody gathered at a large clearing near the edge of the village. A big fire was blazing in the middle, with a boar roasting on a spit. “The hunters caught it today,” Liva said proudly as they approached the gathering. “It’s not often that we get such a feast, and we’re happy we can welcome you to the village properly.”
Blaise counted about a hundred people, ranging in age from toddlers to elders. It was a sizable settlement, he realized, watching them.
“Here, Blaise, have a drink,” an attractive dark-haired woman exclaimed, coming up to him and handing him a clay cup. She looked vaguely familiar, and the way she was talking made it seem like they knew each other.
“Thank you,” Blaise said, and then he realized that the woman was Ara—the female hunter he’d met earlier. He almost didn’t recognize her in a feminine blue dress, with her long hair unbound and streaming down her back. She’d looked so much like a boy before that the transformation was startling. Taking a sip of the drink she handed him, Blaise choked and made a face. “What is this?”
She laughed, patting him on the back. “Fermented berries. Not as fancy as the wine you’re probably used to, right?”
Blaise grinned at her. “I don’t typically drink, but the wine I had before was indeed very different.”
At that moment, Gala came up to them, a strange expression on her face. She looked almost angry. Looping her arm through Blaise’s elbow, she gave Ara a haughty look. “I don’t think Blaise likes that drink of yours,” she said sharply.
Blaise stared at his creation in shock. He’d never seen her be purposefully rude. Did she dislike Ara for some reason?
Ara shot Gala an equally disdainful look. “I think as a former Council member, Blaise can decide for himself what he does and does not like,” she began, and Blaise saw Gala’s free hand curling into a fist. The truth dawned on him. Gala was jealous. He needed to diffuse the situation and quickly.
“Gala,” he said evenly, “why don’t we take a walk right now? I think the fresh air would be good for us. Ara—thank you for the drink. It was actually quite good.” And before Gala could protest, he led her into the woods, trying not to notice the disappointed expression on Ara’s face.
“Gala, were you jealous?” he asked when they were out of the earshot of the villagers. “Was that why you acted this way with Ara?”
Gala looked at him, a stormy expression on her face. “Do you like her?” To his surprise, there was a hurt note in her voice. “Do you want her? Because I think she wants you—”
“What? No!” Blaise couldn’t believe someone so beautiful was feeling insecure. “You’re the only one I want. How can you even think otherwise? Ara was just being friendly—”
“No, she wasn’t,” Gala said quietly. “I’ve seen her looking at you before. She doesn’t act this friendly with the others—only with you.”
Blaise took a deep breath. “Regardless of what Ara may or may not feel, what matters is how I feel,” he said, holding Gala’s gaze. “And I can assure you, you have nothing to worry about. I don’t think of her that way.”
A faint flush stole across her face. “I’m sorry,” she said, looking away. “I don’t know what came over me. It’s not logical, but I don’t like the thought of you with some other woman. Even Augusta, although I know it’s in the past—”
“Gala . . .” Blaise reached for her hand, clasping it between his palms. His heart was beating faster, and a feeling very much like euphoria spread through him. “Believe me,” he said softly, “I can’t think of anyone but you.”
She looked up at him again, her expression unusually vulnerable. “And I can’t think of anyone but you,” she whispered, her eyes large and liquid in the fading twilight.
Unable to res
ist, Blaise bent his head and kissed her, his hands sliding around her back to press her closer. It was only the knowledge that the entire village was less than fifty feet away that enabled him to stop with just a kiss.
“Come,” he murmured, taking her hand again. “Let’s go back. And please, don’t be upset with every woman I speak to. I can promise you, they mean nothing to me.”
Gala gave him a soft smile. “All right. I will try.”
When they got back, the boar was ready, and the women were starting to slice off thick pieces of meat dripping with fat. Liva handed Gala and Blaise two misshapen wooden plates loaded with meat and roasted vegetables, and they sat down to eat next to the fire.
An old, white-haired man was sitting near them, with a few children gathered around him. He was telling the children a story. As Blaise listened closer, he realized it was one of the myths from the western lands.
“In the beginning, a thousand years ago, the world was all water,” the elderly man began, his voice deep and sonorous. “There was nothing there except two brothers—the Sea Monster and the Thunder Creature. They lived together, in the water and the sky, until one day they had a big fight. The Thunder Creature was envious of the Sea Monster’s freedom to swim, and in a fit of jealous rage, he ripped the Sea Monster’s heart out. That heart became the land of Koldun, and the Sea Monster’s flesh became its people. With his brother gone, the Thunder Creature went insane from loneliness, his howls creating the storms that surround our land to this very day.”
The old man paused, and Blaise saw that the children were looking at the old man in wide-eyed fascination—and so was Gala.
"That’s not what I read,” she told the old man, looking puzzled. “And what I read sounded much more plausible.”
Blaise smiled at her confusion. “Gala, these are just old stories . . . legends. They are not meant to be taken literally.”
The elderly storyteller frowned at Blaise. “What do you mean by that, sorcerer? These are the stories passed down for generations. Do you have some other explanation for how we came to be?”
“Well, yes, actually,” Blaise said slowly. He didn’t want to offend these people and their beliefs, so he needed to proceed carefully. “We don’t have all the answers, but we know a couple of things for sure. The world is very old. A thousand years is but a moment compared to its true age. In fact, there are trees that are older than that—you can tell their age from the number of rings inside their trunks. Sorcerers studying weather patterns have found a couple of pine trees that are over five thousand years old.”
The old man stared at him in shock, and some of the children giggled, enjoying the adults’ disagreement. “Over five thousand years?” one little boy asked, his eyes round with wonder. “That’s a long time for a tree to be alive.”
“Indeed,” Blaise said, smiling at the child. “But that’s not the only proof of our land’s true age. There are stalactites in the caverns of these very mountains that grow at a rate of about four inches every thousand years. Given how long some of them are, they must’ve been growing for hundreds of thousands of years. And, of course, there are the mountains themselves. The canyon that’s nearby has been formed by erosion from water and the other elements—a process that has most likely taken millions, not thousands, of years.”
The elderly man still looked skeptical. “If that’s true,” he said, “then where did Koldun and all of us come from? How did we come to be?”
“That’s a good question, and one that wise men have been pondering for ages,” Blaise said. “One theory right now is that nature shaped people, not unlike how people bred wolfhounds and shepherd dogs from the primordial wolf.”
He was about to continue his explanation when a loud boom shook the ground. At the same time, the sky lit up with a blazing white-and-purple light before going dark again.
Everybody froze, and one of the younger children began to cry. Only Gala looked more curious than alarmed.
“Was that thunder?” Blaise asked, looking at the frightened faces around the fire. “I’ve never heard it be so loud.”
The old man rose to his feet, his hands trembling. “Yes, sorcerer, that was thunder. It sounds like a storm is heading our way.”
Chapter 26: Augusta
Once she stopped shaking from the aftereffects of her battle with Ganir and the debilitating fear left her mind, Augusta began considering the consequences of what she’d done.
Ganir’s limp body was lying on the floor. She knelt beside it and pressed her fingers against his neck to feel his pulse. It was there, still going strong. The Council Leader was alive, but his mind was deep in a coma, just as she had intended. Of course, she hadn’t planned to use this particular spell on Ganir, but she was glad she’d had the cards on her. The spell had saved her life. And now that she knew it worked on people as well, she would definitely need to prepare new cards before leaving Turingrad.
Now that she had rendered the old man unconscious, Augusta wasn’t sure what to do with him. Ideally she should kill him, but the thought of snuffing out another sorcerer’s life was repugnant to her. Despite their differences, she’d always respected Ganir’s abilities, and the idea of killing him in cold blood bothered her.
She couldn’t let the others find him, though. They would immediately suspect sorcery, and since Augusta’s differences with Ganir were public knowledge, that would not bode well for her. Even though she knew she was in the right on this, she had no doubt there would still be a trial—a trial that could delay the upcoming mission to destroy Blaise’s creation.
No, she couldn’t let that happen. Ganir needed to disappear.
After pondering the problem for a minute, Augusta began working on a complex and highly risky spell. There was a chance that it could kill Ganir, but that was better than murdering him outright.
When the spell was done, she loaded the cards and watched the old sorcerer’s body disappear. If her calculations were correct, it would reappear in Ganir’s mansion in his territory, far away from Turingrad. She knew the location because Ganir had hosted a party there several years ago, and she and Blaise had been invited. Of course, if Ganir had changed anything in that room of his house—or if she had miscalculated even a tiny bit—he could easily end up dead. She didn’t feel too guilty about that, though, not when he had been planning to kill her with that fear spell of his.
Taking one last look around the empty roof, Augusta opened the door leading to the rooftop and began to climb down the winding staircase. She needed to make her way back to Ganir’s study, and she wasn’t about to risk teleportation again.
Walking through the hallways, she made sure that no one saw her as she approached Ganir’s quarters. She needed to find something, anything that would give her more information about where Blaise and his creature were. It seemed unlikely they would live in a desolate canyon, though that canyon could still be a good place to start looking for them.
Opening the door quietly, Augusta surveyed the room. Ganir was almost impossibly neat. She couldn’t find any recently written notes lying about, or jars of Life Capture droplets. As she looked around, however, she noticed a single droplet inside his Sphere.
Without hesitation she walked over to it, sat down in his chair, and brought the droplet to her mouth.
* * *
Ganir observed the three men who were tied up in his study—Barson’s soldiers who had been captured in a tavern in Turingrad. The binds were not necessary, strictly speaking, as he had already pacified them with a spell. Still, it paid to be cautious. Some stronger minds could snap out of the lethargy of the spell prematurely, which could be a problem with these men. He had to concentrate on the key spell, the spell that would finally rid him of the nuisance that was Barson.
At that moment, a Contact message reached his mind.
“Ganir, this is Blaise. I wanted to confirm your suspicions. Jandison was indeed the one who told me what the vote breakdown was.”
Hearing that, Ganir was ov
ercome with a fury so strong, he actually shook with it. Because of Jandison’s treachery, he had lost Louie and then nearly lost Blaise. Ganir had never had children of his own, and Dasbraw’s boys had been the closest he’d gotten to having sons. And now Louie was dead, and Blaise hated him.
Jandison would pay for this. Ganir would make sure of that.
In the meantime, there was another, more urgent problem that required handling. Barson made a fatal error by pretending to be dead . . . because now Ganir would make sure that the lie became reality.
Stepping toward the captured men, he pulled out his Interpreter Stone and began loading the cards he’d prepared earlier. This was a spell he was quite proud of; it was unfortunate that nobody would ever learn of it. This degree of mind control was the most advanced psychological sorcery, and Ganir didn’t know anyone else who could do something of this magnitude.
No, that wasn’t true, he corrected himself. Gala, Blaise’s creation, could do this and more. She had literally changed the brain of Davish without forcibly controlling his thoughts, as Ganir was about to do with these soldiers. And the effect of her spell was permanent in nature, while Ganir’s was temporary at best—though a few hours was all he needed to achieve his goal.
He desperately wished he could talk to her, to learn about how her mind worked and how she had come to be. He wanted to delve into the mystery that was this Spell Realm-born creature, and it was frustrating to him that Blaise was so overprotective of her. The young man saw her as a desirable woman—which Ganir could still understand on some level—but her beauty blinded Blaise to her true potential. With someone like Gala at his side, Ganir would be unstoppable. He would never need to use intrigue or subtlety with the Council again. One touch of her pretty hands, and they would think whatever he wished them to think.
As the spell he’d unleashed on the soldiers finally took effect, Ganir could see the glazed look in their eyes. It was safe to let them go. Their programming was simple: kill Barson and then themselves. If, by some chance, the last part didn’t work out, they would not remember any of it anyway, as the spell was designed to suppress their memory of this mind manipulation.
