Secrets and Spellcraft

by Michael G. Manning

  “Where can I find her?”

  The receptionist pointed. “Down that hall. Last door on the left.”

  Will took the path indicated and found himself in front of a white door with a nameplate above it. He knocked and entered after hearing a response, “Come in.”

  The room was a stark contrast to the orderly appearance of the front lobby and just about every other part of the Healing and Psyche building. It was cluttered, with floor-to-ceiling shelves surrounding a wooden desk. The shelves were crammed with ledgers and papers, while the desk itself was barely visible. Behind it sat a dowdy woman with brown hair tied into something resembling a bun. “Can I help you?” she asked.

  “I was told you handle the purchasing of potions for the hospital wing.”

  She looked him up and down, her face emotionless. “I do. You must be the latest sacrifice.”

  “That’s what I’m told,” said Will.

  “You’re the one who killed the count’s son, right?” He nodded, and she continued, “You’re never going to make enough to pay that blood-price.”

  “I intend to try. How much will you pay?”

  “I’m assuming you made blood-cleansing potions.” Then she stopped. “I’m Ilona Fretz, by the way.”

  “Will Cartwright.”

  “Call me Ilona,” she replied. “I can offer nine crowns for a blood-cleansing potion. How many do you have?”

  “Four, but I can make as many as you’ll buy.”

  She gave him a sad look. “I wish I could say no, but if it wasn’t for people like you, we wouldn’t have any for our patients. Let’s see the ones you’ve made.”

  The potions were in his pouch. Will drew them out and placed them on the desk, or attempted to—there wasn’t enough empty space to set them down. Ilona solved his crisis by taking them from him directly and then storing them in a drawer. “You can collect the crowns from the Bursar’s Office tomorrow. I’ll send them a notice of credit.”

  “Don’t you want to make sure they’re properly made?”

  “I will,” she said. “If they aren’t, you’ll find out when you go to collect.”

  “I’ll bring more at the end of the week,” Will told her.

  Ilona sighed. “I shouldn’t say this, but it won’t matter how many you bring. You’ll never get the thousand crowns you need selling potions to us.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because our budget for such purposes is limited.”

  Will felt his stomach clench. “How limited? Would it help if I take a lower price?”

  She gave him a look of pity. “Lower it all you want, but we can’t spend more than six hundred crowns on potions. That’s my budget for the year. Normally, though we’d like more, there aren’t enough potions coming in to come close to that figure.”

  “Can’t you get your budget increased? I can make at least two hundred if you can buy them.”

  Ilona shook her head. “I don’t have that sort of authority.”

  “If I sell them to you at a decreased cost the department could consider it an investment for the future. I’d be willing to sell them for four gold a piece if you’ll buy enough to get me to the total I need,” said Will desperately.

  Her expression was sympathetic. “You could wind up taking ten years off your life doing something like that. Are you sure?”

  He nodded.

  “I’ll talk to Doctor Morris about it. If he’s interested, he might take it to the Chancellor’s Office and see if he can get them to agree. I can’t make any promises, though.”

  “Thank you,” said Will. He left after that, unsure how he should feel. On the one hand, he had pretty much secured more than half of the thousand crowns, but on the other, he had no idea how he’d make the other four hundred crowns. Could he sell the other potions that Professor Karlovic had given him instructions for? He didn’t think he could find several hundred paranoid nobles to buy the universal antidote, and even if he could, would they deal with the killer of Count Spry’s son?

  What about the potion for men? How would he go about selling hundreds and hundreds of those? He’d have to make nearly five hundred to cover the materials and have enough profit left over to leave him with four hundred crowns.

  “One day at a time,” he told himself. “Something will come up.” He started snickering to himself. That would be a good sales line for the virility potion, ‘something will come up.’

  Chapter 20

  He stuck to his plan during the next few days, going to classes and spending most of his free time in the evenings finishing blood-cleansing potions. By Thursday he had twelve more finished and he was already sick of making them. His classes that day were uneventful, until he met with Professor Dulaney for his private spellcraft session.

  The professor was walking him through the structure of a complex transducing spell construct, something that was widely used, and which also served as the basis for the transducers that artificers used in their enchantments. The entire thing was worse than useless for Will, since he was able to transform turyn as needed, but Dulaney insisted that he needed to learn it as part of his foundation in modern spellcraft.

  During a brief pause, Will asked a question that had been on his mind. “Are there demons in Cerria?”

  The professor sat back, staring at him in surprise. “I should hope not. Why would you ask that?”

  “I saw some black turyn,” said Will. When Dulaney frowned, he corrected himself, “I saw some turyn that possessed a void polarity.”

  “You’re referring to when you saw the demon in Barrowden?”

  “No, sir. I saw it in the city.”

  “You’re restricted to the campus, aren’t you?”

  “Well—”

  The professor shook his head. “I should have known. So, you snuck out. When was this?”

  “A little over a week ago,” he admitted.

  “And where did you see this void turyn?”

  “It was on a post holding up a shop awning. It looked like a paw print.”

  Dulaney looked at him oddly. “You saw a trace left on an object?”

  He nodded.

  “It should have been too faint to see. There are spells to detect such things, but I don’t think a person could just spot it without some sort of aid unless the source of the turyn was right there in front of them.”

  Will cursed himself. He’d forgotten that he’d amplified his vision in order to see the traces. Nothing to do but double down, I guess. “I can see trace amounts, if I try hard,” he insisted.

  The professor seemed doubtful. “Let’s do a test then.” He held up his hand. “You step out of the room. I’ll put my hand on something in the room and channel a bit of turyn into it. If you can come in and tell me what I touched, I’ll consider it proof.”

  “Fine,” said Will, then he rose and went into the hall, closing the door behind him. After a few minutes Professor Dulaney called for him to come back in.

  “Let’s see what you can do.”

  Will glanced around the room with his normal eyesight first. As always, there were wisps of turyn floating through the air, currents that moved around and past himself and the professor. He thought there was a hint of something stronger on the bookcase, but he couldn’t pinpoint it exactly where.

  Dulaney studiously ignored him as he walked to the bookcase, giving away nothing. Will stared at the shelves, then adjusted his vision until the wisps of turyn around him began to glow brightly. A thumbprint appeared on the spine of one of the volumes. Will pointed to the spot. “Here. You put your thumb right there.”

  “Interesting!” exclaimed Dulaney. “If I hadn’t just seen you do that, I wouldn’t have believed it. How long will the mark remain visible to you?”

  “Huh?”

  “Raw turyn traces like that diffuse at a predictable rate, losing about half their intensity every thirty minutes or so. The question in my mind now is how sensitive your sight is. What’s your limit? If you knew that, you could esti
mate how long it had been since the trace you saw in the city was left there, or at the very least you could put a rough limit on how long it had been.”

  Will was confused. “Wouldn’t that depend on how strong the initial trace was?”

  “The diffusion follows an exponential curve,” said Dulaney. “Even if the initial application of turyn was very intense, it would dim quickly. If you figure out how sensitive your ability to see is, you can still get an estimate. You might be off by a few hours if the source was much stronger than expected, but even that would be helpful to know.”

  “Should I stay here and watch until I can’t see the thumbprint any longer?”

  The professor laughed. “Do it in your room. I have things to do later. I can’t have you hanging around my office for however long it takes. Back to your original question, there should be no demons in Cerria. If one did somehow get in, it would be big news. Are you certain of what you saw?”

  He nodded. “Very sure. Are there other things that could have produced it besides a demon?”

  “None that would be any less alarming than a demon in the capital. The undead use void-polarized turyn, but necromancy is forbidden, and there hasn’t been a confirmed case of anyone practicing necromancy in decades.”

  “What should we do?”

  Dulaney gave him a direct stare. “You should do nothing. I’ll report this to the proctors. If you do happen to see anything else like this, let me know immediately. As for sneaking out, you do understand why the chancellor ordered that you be kept within the confines of Wurthaven, don’t you?”

  “To punish me.”

  “No, to protect you,” corrected his teacher. “The college can’t do anything about your monetary problems, but we can try to keep you safe. Count Spry may not be patient enough to wait for you to fail to pay his blood-price, in which case he may have hired people to waylay you in the city. You should consider that before you recklessly go around disobeying the chancellor’s rules.”

  “You’re not going to report me, sir?”

  Dulaney shook his head. “No. I’ve explained the ‘why’ of it. It’s up to you to show some sense.”

  Will went back to his room after that. He didn’t feel like making potions, so he decided to relax after supper. Of course, after sitting in his room for an hour or two, he got bored. His complete lack of a social life was beginning to grate on his nerves. So, he worked on the unlocking spell some more. The feeling of constructing so many runes and connecting them together was a strange one; as he got close to completing it, the spell the construct would begin to wobble, as slight imperfections in the earlier runes began to add up, making the entire thing unstable. Each time he tried it got better, but eventually it would grow too unwieldy and collapse, sending glowing sparks onto his lap where they winked and vanished.

  I’m getting close, he told himself. It was just a matter of refining his control. Each time as he neared his limit, he imagined it must be similar to the feeling a juggler got when trying to add another ball to the number he could keep in the air.

  He remembered Selene building her signature spell, the ‘princess purification,’ in front of him. At the time he hadn’t known how difficult her feat was, but she had done it flawlessly. How long did she practice to have that kind of control? he wondered. At the time he had only been concerned with showing off his ability to take someone else’s spell from their control, and he had overlooked the magnificence of her achievement.

  At the moment, his highest aspiration was to be able to master her spell, to be capable of creating an eighth-order spell construct, as she had done. Lately he’d begun using some of the cleaning spells in Practical Magic to clean his clothes, his armor, and even his room, but having a spell like hers, one that could do it all, seemed extraordinary.

  Tired of trying the same spell over and over, he turned to the next page. “Wind Wall,” he read the title aloud. Then he studied the description and realized it was the spell his grandfather had used to protect himself from the crossbow bolts fired at him on the day that he died. Almost worked, Will reminded himself. Arrogan hadn’t accounted for the fact that one of the crossbowmen would fire early, striking him before the order to fire.

  Judging by the complexity, it seemed to be third-order, similar in difficulty to the unlocking spell, so he turned to the next page. “Demon Armor,” read Will. “What’s this?” At a glance, the spell was simpler than the previous one, probably second-order. The description said that it produced a defensive flame that encapsulated the caster’s body. As he read further on, it also stated that the flames wouldn’t harm people or objects. In short, it wouldn’t burn anything.

  Will activated the limnthal so he could talk to the ring. “What’s this spell, demon armor, supposed to do?”

  The ring chuckled darkly. “It looks awesome.”

  “That’s it? It looks scary?”

  “Well, it had a practical purpose once, but nobody really needs it these days.”

  “So, what was the purpose?”

  The ring barked, “Moron, did you read the name? It’s demon armor, what do you think it does?”

  “Make me look like a demon?”

  “Somebody give me hands so I can smack myself in the face,” said the ring. “No, it protects the caster from demons! You said you saw one once, right? Did you see flames around it?”

  Will shook his head. “No, it was all teeth and black smoke.”

  “Well, they take different forms, but one thing is true of all of them. They use a type of turyn that is the antithesis of living creatures. Do you know why most of the elementals you see are fire elementals?” asked the ring.

  “I just assumed it was because fire is so destructive.”

  “All elementals are destructive,” said the ring. “No, the reason is that at that time, when Valemon was chopping up—” the ring stopped speaking for a moment, then resumed. “I mean, when he was starting to create elementals, he had a desperate cause. The Cult of Madrok was infiltrating the Empire, what you call ‘Greater Darrow’ these days. They had demons, and they were damned hard to fight. Fire was the best weapon against them.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s high in energy and low in order, or physicality. That means it’s one of the best types of turyn to counter demonic essence. It burns them far better than it burns people. If he’d been making elementals to fight wizards, he’d have chosen earth or water—those have a high degree of order and consequently use a lot of physical matter. Even air would be better against a human.”

  Will was confused. From what he had seen, fire elementals were incredibly destructive. He couldn’t think of anything so terrifying as being burned alive. “Fire seems just as dangerous to me,” he opined.

  “To regular people, sure,” said the ring. “But to a true wizard, it’s the easiest type of elemental attack to nullify, because it’s almost entirely pure energy. Sure, there’s a little bit of plasma in there, but once you absorb or convert the turyn, it doesn’t do much. You’ve defended yourself from fire attacks. You should remember how easy it was.”

  “Well, yeah,” said Will, still uncertain.

  “Think about what would happen if an earth elemental attacked you with a stone spike from the ground,” said the ring. “If you absorb the turyn from the attack that’s wonderful, but what’s left? You still wind up with a goddamn piece of obsidian up your ass. So, what if the elemental can no longer control it? You’re dead.”

  Will nodded. “I guess that makes sense, but what about demons? Why is fire so bad for them?”

  “Are you really that stupid? I just explained it to you.”

  He sighed. “Rephrase it for me then.”

  “Demons have a very loose association with what we think of as physical matter. Their bodies are sometimes solid, but more often they’re a loose collection of nasty things. What connects those pieces is the foul turyn they produce. Since fire is very close to its exact opposite, it destroys their essence very effectively.
Think about it this way—what happened when your girlfriend fought the demon?”

  “She’s not my girlfriend,” said Will.

  “Lover, whatever you want to call her, it doesn’t matter. So, when—”

  “She wasn’t my lover,” he interjected, his face turning red.

  “Fuck-friend?”

  “What’s wrong with you?” Will exclaimed. “No! She’s a princess and I’m—no one.”

  “You’re the last goddamn true wizard in the world,” corrected the ring. “As much as I hate to admit that, you’re pretty fucking important. I’d say you’re worth at least three or four useless sorcerer princesses. Didn’t you save her life?”

  “We saved each other a few times,” said Will indignantly.

  “And you didn’t even get laid? Tell me the truth, Will. I don’t have eyes, so answer my next question honestly.”

  He was beginning to regret starting the entire conversation, but he played along. “What’s the question?”

  “Are you ugly? I don’t mean regular ugly—I mean horse’s ass ugly. Like the kind of ugly only a mother would love but she still wouldn’t take you out in public.”

  Will ground his teeth together but remained silent.

  “You can be truthful. It doesn’t matter to me, since I can’t see or smell you. Do people run screaming in the other direction when they see you on the street?”

  “Are you done?”

  “Almost. I’m just glad I finally understand why you don’t have any friends. They’re probably scared the ugly might be contagious.”

  Will sighed audibly.

  “All right. Back to the topic at hand,” said the ring. “So, when your platonic princess friend with the tolerance and compassion of a saint fought the demon to protect your indescribably grotesque person from the demon, she was using earth and water, right?”

  “I have some objections to your description, but yes,” said Will.

  “And how did that work out for her?”

  “It got in close and sort of covered her, then it started prying apart her stone armor and got inside.”