Marin's Codex

by Benjamin Medrano

  “I’ll keep quiet while you work,” Valis promised, and Emonael gave him a bright smile.

  Turning back to the crystal, Emonael went over the divination spell again, ensuring that she had the right version of the spell in mind, then began her casting, slowing down so that she could be more precise. The spell was among the more complex ones that Marin had taught Emonael, and it took a good minute to cast, power building in the air around her the entire time.

  As she made the last gesture and spoke the last word, a rush of near-vertigo washed over Emonael as an entirely new set of senses sprang to life. It was like there was an overlay of new colors to her vision, though that wasn’t quite the right term. Even with her eyes closed she could sense the magic flowing through the room around her, pulsing with a deep, thrumming sensation . . . it was a strange, distracting thing to do, yet Emonael focused through it, her senses sweeping through the room quickly just to be certain.

  As Valis had said, most of the items in the room were filled with magic, though some of them appeared to be far weaker than their outer appearance might suggest, and a lump of black ore was shining like a brilliant white star to Emonael’s new senses. Valis himself blazed even brighter to her ‘sight,’ though. The man stood there easily as he shone with crimson-gold radiance, his mana veins brilliant as they shone through his skin. The sight made Emonael pause in admiration, almost audibly sighing at the sight of such rich magic.

  Turning away from him, Emonael looked at the crystal, and her eyes narrowed marginally. The faceted gem did blaze with magic, but there was something strange about it. The crystal was oddly fragile-seeming to her senses, and she could almost feel it creaking from the fire mana contained within it. It was like the mana was trying to escape, and there was something else, too. She saw a thread of mana twisting and extending some distance to the west, and she scowled as she finally realized what she was looking at.

  “Valis, this crystal was overfilled with fire mana. I sense a thread of mana going somewhere to the west, but I think you’d best dispose of this soon. If I’m not mistaken, if more mana is pushed into it, it’ll violently explode,” Emonael explained softly as she stared at it. “I can’t tell you how far the thread goes, but I don’t think I want this anywhere near a building when it shatters.”

  “Oh, gods damn it!” Valis spat, staring at the crystal with sudden anger. “This was a damned trap? Who . . . ? No, that doesn’t matter right now. First I need to dispose of it, then I can worry about that part. You can’t tell me anything else about it?”

  “No, though it is relatively potent fire magic. Not as . . . pure as yours, though. Under my spell, your magic shines a crimson-gold, while this is more blood-red,” Emonael explained, shrugging slightly. “Everyone’s magic is a slightly different color. If I had this spell going and I saw the user, I could identify them, but that’s the extent of it.”

  “Damn. Well, that’s something, at least,” the High Mage muttered, then paused, obviously thinking for a long moment before looking at Emonael seriously. “Emonael, may I ask how long you can maintain that spell?”

  “If I didn’t do anything else . . . I probably could maintain it for an hour or two in a day. I have to move slowly and concentrate to use it, though. May I ask why?” Emonael replied, a part of her wondering what Valis was going to ask. She suspected he was going to ask her to look over the various magi and apprentices in the Association.

  “I see. Well, unless you object to my doing so, I’m going to ask Marin to lend you to me for the next few days,” Valis replied, his voice grim as he looked at the shard. “If there was one shard like this planted around the Association, there could be more. There’s no way in all the hells that a single shard like that could do too much damage, and the drakes would be more of an irritation than anything else. I’d rather not risk you in such a way, but the only ones who could possibly help find them are you and Marin.”

  “Oh! That . . . yes, that makes complete sense!” Emonael said, mentally cursing as she realized she hadn’t even considered the possibility of more of the stones being planted in the surrounding countryside. It was yet another reminder that while she often looked down on mortals, they weren’t idiots. In some ways, their mortality made them more aware of particular dangers than a demon might be. She tended to focus on traitors and saboteurs, as those were often the greatest threats in demonic society, and defending oneself was paramount. Allowing her spell to dissipate, she continued. “If you’d like, I can go speak with Marin while you deal with the crystal?”

  “I’m going to let High Mage Hothar know first, but that sounds excellent to me,” Valis agreed, then sighed as he added. “Also, please let me know if she objects. I can come try to reason with her.”

  “If there’s a problem, I’ll let you know. I sincerely doubt there will be, though,” Emonael replied, hesitating a moment before adding, “She may have a solution to dealing with them as well, so I’ll ask.”

  “Please do,” Valis replied, nodding politely to Emonael. She gave a curtsey and left as he glared at the crystal like he was staring at a poisonous snake.

  As she left the tower, Emonael saw a pair of Valis’s other apprentices, a pair of young men, and she nodded to them as she briskly headed back for Marin’s tower, her mind racing as she went through ideas to deal with the crystals. The biggest problem was that they had that connection to another person, allowing them to overload the crystals from wherever they were hiding out. Without that, they could probably find a way to drain the mana from the crystals to use in spells, but it was too dangerous as it was. That much mana could possibly injure Emonael, potentially even severely.

  She entered Marin’s tower, and as she did, a temptation arose within her once more, and she paused as she locked the door behind her. The temptation to overwhelm Marin’s mind with her natural mental magics and steal everything that Marin knew was dangerous. If she took everything, including Marin’s soul, back to the lower planes, she could learn all the magic that Marin had gathered without having to share it with others, and without having to risk the dangers around the Association. For a minute, Emonael froze, weighing the thought carefully.

  “No. If I do that, she may lose something important. She only has a few years left . . . and it isn’t that dangerous,” Emonael murmured, shaking her head and ignoring the tiny part of her that was outraged by the temptation. “Besides, if anyone else in the lower planes figured out what she was doing, they’d steal her from me and I’d lose everything.”

  The demon walked deeper into the tower, only to find that Marin was at her desk, making several notes as she pored over her books. The mage didn’t seem to have noticed Emonael’s entrance, and as she looked her over, Emonael felt a pang of worry as she saw how thin and delicate the elderly elf was looking, and how the first strands of crimson hair were beginning to turn white. She knew that elves retained apparent youth until their last two to three decades, so that sign was . . . unpleasant.

  “Teacher? May I speak to you?” Emonael asked softly.

  “Of course, Emonael. I think I’m pretty much done collating. I think I may be able to start writing the first draft tomorrow, in fact,” Marin replied, turning in her chair to face Emonael with a smile. “Who was it, anyway? You were gone for a while.”

  “High Mage Valis. I’m glad to hear that you’re about done, but he had a problem. You know the crystal that was found in the drake nest? He wanted to see if you could try to divine where it might be from or the like,” Emonael explained. “I didn’t want to bother you, so I volunteered to look at it instead.”

  “Ah, yes, that crystal. It looked like it had a rather lot of mana in it, as I recall. Not surprising, if it attracted fire drakes to this region.” Marin murmured, and her eyes narrowed. “Still, I haven’t taught you any spells that would allow you to figure out its source. I’m sure we could put together a spell like that eventually, but I don’t have any to do so in my records. It’d take a lot of work.”

  “You�
��re right. The problem is that the crystal was overloaded with fire mana, and I could feel a link going somewhere to the west. It had at least twenty times the mana that we’ve used with the more powerful fireball spells, Teacher,” Emonael told Marin in worry. “I think someone could overload them from a distance and cause them to explode.”

  “Ah, that would be . . . most unpleasant. I’ve seen the aftermath of things like that. I don’t recommend experiencing a mana storm to anyone,” Marin replied, wincing. “Fire would be even worse, I imagine.”

  “I . . . I suppose, Teacher,” Emonael said, shelving her curiosity about when Marin had encountered a mana storm. That could wait. “He worried that crystal might not be the only one in the area, and asked if he could borrow me for a few days to survey the area for dangers.”

  “That’s definitely an unpleasant thought. Do you want to?” Marin asked, her eyebrows knit together. “The research can wait for a few days . . . I’m going to be busy anyway. So, truly, it’s up to you.”

  “I think I’d like to. It would help keep the Association a little safer, and keep people from interrupting you too much, I think,” Emonael admitted. “I also hoped you might have a way to break the link or such, so we aren’t risking the crystals exploding while we’re transporting them.”

  “Let me think . . .” Marin murmured, sitting back and obviously considering for several long moments. After a short while, she nodded and said, “From my journal from seventy-eight years ago; the blue-covered one. The spell is called Spell Ripper, by a mage named Imar the Defiant. He used it to rip apart the spells of his opponents; you should be able to use it to cut the link, and it should be well within your ability to cast.”

  “Thank you, Teacher,” Emonael replied, smiling broadly. “Is there anything I can do to help before I go?”

  “Thank you, Emonael, but if you keep the grounds from exploding, that’s quite enough for me,” Marin replied with a soft laugh. “That would be a bit more of a distraction than even I can ignore. Be safe out there.”

  “I’ll try. Take care of yourself, Teacher,” Emonael told Marin, who simply laughed as she waved Emonael away and turned back to her books.

  Emonael shook her head as she turned to the library and began looking for the book in question. At least Marin organized her journals by decade, and color-coded them inside that range, otherwise it would be far more difficult. Finding the book, the demon smiled and pulled it from the shelf, happily humming at the thought of learning still more magic.

  Chapter 10

  Marin stopped writing at the crack of thunder that rolled over her tower, looking up from the pages and blinking as she heard the drumming of rain against the roof. She hadn’t noticed the storm before, but now that she wasn’t focused on her work, she felt the aching in her bones and shivered slightly. Stretching, she winced and murmured the words of a spell, sending a healing spell washing through her body that at least eased the worst of the pain.

  “I’m almost there, even if my body doesn’t appreciate that,” Marin spoke aloud, scooting back the chair so she could stand and go over to find a shawl to help ward off the chill that she was now feeling. Slipping on the shawl, she stepped over to the window to look out over the Association grounds and watched the rain fall. The flash of lightning in the distance prompted a sigh as she shook her head slowly, her mood pensive, to say the least.

  Despite her progress, and the fact that the end of her research was close, Marin couldn’t help her trepidation. There was a lingering worry that no matter how promising the experiments that she and Emonael had carried out, that something was going to go wrong and she would fail here, at the very end of the road.

  “What a waste that would be. To come so far, yet come up short,” Marin murmured, then smiled slightly as she thought about Emonael. The succubus was obviously confident that Marin didn’t know what she was, and it amused the mage, at least a little. “She even believed my bluff about my library going up in flames if I died. I wonder if she was honestly upset by the thought of losing my research? Probably . . . but it really doesn’t matter, not in the end.”

  Turning away from the window, Marin walked back over to the pages she’d written over the last few days. She was almost done with it, and once properly bound, the pages would form the first volume of her research’s results. The volume went over the theories of tonality and the gestures involved for spells, however the caster chose to make them. It wasn’t complicated in the end, but even so, the explanations that had gone into the research had taken a good while to work out, and she knew that the next volumes would be even more complex.

  With Emonael’s help, she was going through every variable of known spells that they could conceive of, breaking them down into pieces that could be quantified and used. It would either revolutionize magic, or be buried by those who wished for magic to be kept exclusively to the elite and powerful. It was the last possibility that truly worried Marin, that her research might end up lost because of the plotting of the rich and powerful, or even if she was misjudging Emonael.

  “Oh, Balvess . . . may your grace descend and grant me serenity and wisdom,” Marin prayed, closing her eyes as she breathed in and out slowly. Marin didn’t know whether it was her deity’s blessing or the simple act of praying, but a sense of peace came over her.

  Opening her eyes, Marin let out a breath of relief and sat down again to try to finish her work. It didn’t matter if rain, lightning, or even the machinations of an unknown enemy were casting their shadow over her. She had work to do, and not enough time to complete it, especially if she wished to show it to Emonael when she returned.

  Emonael carefully adjusted her wording of the spell, and this time the weave of magic perfectly cut the thread of mana extending into the distance, leaving the crystal they’d found safer than it had been. She let out a soft sigh of relief, nodding at Valis as she smiled. “Got it! I think I’ve figured out how to break the connection more easily, though we’ll see if it works better on any others we might find.”

  “Excellent!” Valis replied with a tired smile. The smile faded into a scowl as he looked around the dripping forest, adding, “Though I could wish that this was the last of them. Gods damn it, how many of the things did they plant?”

  “There’s no way to know. I just wish the weather wasn’t so miserable, as it doesn’t make it any easier to concentrate on the search,” Emonael agreed, rubbing at her nose tiredly. The broad-brimmed hat was drooping under the rain, and she was starting to feel fairly damp, even with the cloak and warm clothing she was wearing.

  “Agreed. I asked Larin if he could do something about it, but he rather snidely informed me that he was a master of air magic, not weather magic,” Valis said, taking a step toward the crystal that had been hidden in a rabbit warren. “We do have a weather mage member of the Association, but he’s—”

  A flicker of movement from the trees across the trail caught Emonael’s attention, movement that was different from that caused by the downpour, and she saw the cloaked figure just as they finished their gestures with a flourish. In response, lightning split the sky to descend directly onto the crystal that Valis was reaching for.

  The flash of light half-blinded Emonael in the instant before the crystal exploded in a violent eruption of flames and shrapnel. The wave of pressure sent her flying back into a tree, her ears ringing as she hit hard, hissing in pain as she fell to her knees. Shards of the crystal had punctured her clothing in a half dozen places at least, and her back was likely going to be a single massive bruise, but she’d experienced far worse.

  Emonael shrugged off the effect, looking up to see that the small clearing they’d been in was now dominated by a smoldering crater, wisps of steam rising from its surface as Valis groaned, looking surprisingly intact given how close he’d been to the explosion, but bloodied and with torn clothing of his own. The man was on the other side of the crater from Emonael, and her eyes widened as she saw the attacker stepping out of the woods, the woman�
��s voice rising in another incantation as she pointed at Valis!

  The thought of letting Valis die and running flickered through Emonael’s mind and was instantly discarded, even if it was largely because she didn’t care for the thought of being a coward before a mere mortal. Besides, a not-insignificant part of her was enjoying Valis’s slow attempt at seduction. She discarded several direct solutions for one which she’d actually been practicing the last few days.

  The gestures and words of the incantation to rip a spell apart spilled from Emonael almost effortlessly, and the spell was far simpler than the grandiose one that the woman was casting, allowing her to cast it before their assailant could finish her own. With a flick of her finger, Emonael sent her spell lashing out at the woman, whose spell suddenly exploded in a tiny thunderclap, causing the woman to recoil.

  “What in the . . . why, you little brat! I’m going to kill you for that!” the woman raged, turning toward Emonael, her hood back far enough to reveal the fair skin and brown hair and eyes of the elven woman.

  “You’ll try,” Emonael corrected, standing up. As the woman began a spell, she started one of her own, focusing on keeping her gestures accurate but quick, while thanking the heavens that Marin hadn’t been one of those magi who liked keeping combat magic for later!

  The woman’s incantation was faster this time, and Emonael kept a close eye on the mage, trying to read her timing. The moment that she was making the last gestures of her spell, Emonael stepped smoothly to the side, finishing her own spell as she did.

  A bolt of lightning lashed out from the woman’s hands and into the tree that Emonael had been standing under. The tree audibly cracked, but Emonael grinned as a freezing ball of blue light lashed out from her own hands at the woman. The woman tried to dodge it, but an instant before the orb would’ve hit her, it instead exploded in a blast of freezing cold that likely didn’t do much to the woman directly, but the forest floor was suddenly caked in ice all around her, even as the water saturating her clothing froze solid as well.