by Dante King
“How did she get that burn on her face?” I asked, looking downrange at my own target and mentally switching Noctis into my Right Arm slot as we had been instructed. “Running into a burning building to save a bunch of orphans?”
Penelope gave me a reproachful look. “It isn’t a scar acquired through contact with flame,” she said, “but from venom.”
I glanced at Penelope. “Venom? What kind of creature has venom that can melt flesh like that?”
Before Penelope could answer me, the dulcet, patient tones of Preceptor Ipheca cut through the air.
“Has everyone selected their Right Arm slot? Yes? Good! All right then, on the count of three, you will release and refine your spellcasting technique. Do not accidentally cast your spells at your fellow classmates. Thaumaturgical injuries can be messy and irreversible, and the last thing I fucking feel like doing is filling out the lengthy and boring bit of paperwork that proceeds a death in class.”
She let that indirect warning float over our heads like a cloud of miasma for a second or two. Then she said, “One… two… three!”
I had never felt or been around magic when it had been cast in such profusion before. The feeling reminded me a little of when, in the movies, a whole load of archers let loose at the enemy with their longbows. There was a rush. The air juddered and rippled. There was the sensation of a host of individual little pieces of death rushing forward to create a bigger, more collectively lethal barrier of bad news.
The colors and shapes of the spells were as varied as the skin tones of those casting them. There were scintillating flying needles of green, slow-moving blobs of toxic yellow, a vague form of something translucent and serpentine writhing through the air at knee height, blue fish that swam through the air, and my own shadowy balls of pulsing black and white magic as I cast my Shadow Spheres.
I tried not to get distracted by the mess of sound that was the indescribable din of exploding, imploding, shattering spells to my left. I was, of course, living every nerd’s dream in being in a medieval courtyard and practicing magic, but I was focused on actually spending my time becoming more proficient at it, rather than just goggling at the others.
I reached into the center of my being, as Elenari had told me to do on the first day that we had met, and grasped at the mana that sat in the depths of my sternum like a hot, liquid pearl of possibility.
It was all a mental thing, of course—something that, in battle, I had done as quickly and naturally as breathing—but now I concentrated on the method more than I had done before. I imagined that every step of the spellcasting process could be broken down and peered at closely. In making a concerted effort to understand each individual step more intimately, the better I would be at magic in general. Not to mention, if I knew the technique of casting spells inside and out, I wouldn’t be distracted as easily.
That was the theory anyway. I had not got any further than casting a couple of Shadow Spheres to warm up, before settling down to concentrate on the individual steps of the spell, when my attentiveness was disturbed by a rush of warm air, a smell like freshly mown grass, and a sighing sound.
I looked over to my immediate left, where Penelope was, and saw that my friend had let loose with a spell. The bit of magic left a path of flowers and gently cascading petals in its wake, before striking the crude wooden dummy and wrapping it in flowering vines.
To my untrained eye, the spell, while carrying a nice aesthetic, didn’t look as if it had affected the dummy in any negative way. On the contrary, the target looked more aesthetically pleasing than it had done before. Smelled better too. If it had been a person, the only thing that I could imagine happening to them was that they’d be able to pick up a date more easily, what with all that extra color and free perfume.
For the next quarter of an hour or so, I lost myself in my own little world as I sought to perfect and streamline reaching for my mana. It became more like a reaction than a conscious decision—more like breathing than brushing my teeth, was how I thought of it.
I tuned out the barked orders and tips coming from Preceptor Ipheca. I shut away the curses of frustration and the cries of triumph emanating from the other dragonmancers as they loosed their spells on their unsuspecting wooden targets.
I focused on me, and me alone.
It was very fucking zen, if I do say so myself.
With this practice, I found my mana pool felt larger. Could it be that the Transfusion Ceremony had increased the size of my mana pool? It seemed logical, given that the same ceremony had also made my body into something far more than it had been before.
From there, I moved on to the spell itself.
I fired a few Shadow Spheres down range to get a feel for the spell as I was using it now. The first one hit the target in one of its blocky branch arms. The second hit it in the chest and disappeared the whole thing.
I kept my eyes looking down the range and saw that the target that I had just vanished in a sparking mist of Chaos Magic rematerialized into being. A quick glance to my left showed me that the same latent magic was rebuilding or bringing back into being everyone else’s targets.
“Not bad,” the deep, grudging voice of Preceptor Ipheca said from my side. “But, unsurprisingly, it lacks finesse.”
“No finesse, you reckon, Preceptor?” I asked, turning to look at Preceptor Ipheca’s venom-scarred face. “Surely hitting the target is about as much finesse as a dragonmancer needs during war time?”
The cyclops let out a snort and shook her head. Her arms were folded behind her back, under her sable cloak, giving her a particularly Sith-like vibe. From up close, the breadth and obvious strength of her shoulders was all the more evident. I also noticed that the skin I had taken to be a dusky brown, was actually more like a basalt gray. It had a definite rocky look to it.
“That might be all the accuracy you require in a life-or-death contest, Dragonmancer Noctis,” she said. “But it’s hardly helpful in the day-to-day trials and tribulations that a dragonmancer might find themselves embroiled in.”
I raised an eyebrow. “To be honest, Preceptor, I can’t think of anything I might face in my day-to-day life that might require me to banish someone’s limbs or head into the ether. For that everyday sort of trouble, I’d probably just knock them the fuck out if violence became inevitable.”
The cyclops’ one eye narrowed as she looked me over.
“Yes,” she said in her rich, caramel-covered voice, “there’s no denying that you look more warrior than most of the other Rank Ones here. You look like a man who can certainly defend himself. But you lack imagination.”
“I’ll need you to clarify, Preceptor,” I said politely, although I made sure to inject just the right amount of steel into my words.
“Oh, I’ll bloody clarify for you,” Preceptor Ipheca said scornfully. She uncrossed her hands from behind her back and scratched at her burned face. I saw that the backs of her grayish hands were crossed and recrossed with an impressive collection of dark scars. If the uniform thinness was anything to go by, they were knife wounds or, more likely in this world, the remnants of sword cuts.
“What I mean is,” Preceptor Ipheca continued, in the deliberately slow tone of one explaining something to a halfwit, “is that there are ways to alter your magic, refine it, so that you don’t have to vanish random parts of your target’s anatomy.”
I frowned. “You mean that I can alter the spell’s strength?” I said.
Preceptor Ipheca pointed at me. “Check out the big brain on the Earthling,” she said. “That is the reason that we are here. I want you to figure out how to manipulate your spell so that you can—in your case—vanish precisely what you bloody well meant to vanish.”
“How?” I asked.
“You feel it. You concentrate. You change the form of the spell in your mind. You take only as much mana from your reserves as you think you need to do the job. Don’t fling everything you have at your target and hope to hit it. Find a point on your target that
you wish to strike. Focus with an intensity so complete that, should you miss or allow your concentration to stray, your spell will simply fade.”
“Easier said than done,” I said.
Preceptor Ipheca raised her one eyebrow. “Of course, it is easier said than done,” she said. “Name me one thing that bloody well isn’t.”
“What you’re saying makes sense,” I said. “But have you got any other tips for me?”
The cyclops shook her head. “No, the rest is up to you.”
And so, I did as she said.
Chapter Twelve
Learning how to cause specific things to vanish with my Shadow Sphere spell, not just make whatever the orb touches, was a little like trying to pat your head while you rubbed your stomach; it required coordination—shitloads of that—and thought—but not too much of that.
I had to both imagine the object, or the part of the object, that I wanted to vanish, while also ensuring I hit the object itself with the Shadow Sphere when I threw it. Factor in the whole changing the amount of magic that I pumped into the spell, plus altering the size of the spell itself, and it was no surprise to me how quickly and seamlessly the time slipped by.
At the end of an hour and a half, I was starting to get the hang of it.
“Dragonmancer Noctis,” Preceptor Ipheca said, coming to stand behind me after she had inspected Penelope’s progress. “Let me see how you have refined yourself. Let me see if you have taken on board what I have said.”
The Preceptor grunted her approval as I let loose with a string of sized-down Shadow Spheres that took the bark off the logs and branches that made up the target but left the wood itself intact.
“There,” she said, “is finesse. The real trick is being able to do it when half an enemy army is trying to shoot you off your dragon, or while you’re trying to maintain a conversation at dinner and vanish the leg off someone’s chair so that they fall and create a diversion.”
“Practice makes perfect,” I said breezily.
“No,” Preceptor Ipheca said, “Practice simply ensures that you don’t fuck up too regularly or too dramatically. Remember that, Dragonmancer Noctis.” She held up her head and addressed the class. “Now, those who wish to continue may do so, but the class is officially over. A good ten minutes early, too. You ought to count yourselves lucky.”
And with that, the cyclops woman bent down in a runner’s crouch, then leaped up onto the wall above the practice yard. In a swirl of her cloak, she was gone.
“Badass,” I said under my breath.
A few dragonmancers left now that the class was over, but the majority stayed behind to continue practicing. I resumed my throwing of Shadow Spheres, focusing on the targets, when a laugh from just down the row made me look up.
I was looking at a tall, whip-thin dragonmancer with slicked back blonde hair cut short, an orange complexion, and a proud and beautiful face. She was cackling theatrically and pointing at Penelope.
“Wow,” she said in a high, brittle, heavily accented voice, “that is fucking incredible! So many pretty flowers. Your enemies will be quaking in their boots, eh?”
The Knowledge Sprite was blushing so heavily that her face was the color of a blueberry. She was standing in front of her target, which was wreathed in garlands of flowers and sweet-smelling herbs.
Admittedly—though I would never say anything to Penelope—it did look to me like whatever spell her Right Arm slot gave her would have been about as much use in a fight as a taco shield.
“You should be a fucking florist, not a dragonmancer, sprite!” the blonde-haired woman said and turned to her audience with a smirk across her pretty face. The few dragonmancers that were nearby laughed appreciatively, but without any real enthusiasm, at the gag.
I could think of a gag that was far more appropriate, and after my little training session, I now had the finesse to do it.
As the women continued to cackle like a gaggle of witches, I conjured a couple of miniature Shadow Spheres and sent them whizzing at the woman who was teasing Penelope. They struck her square in the back—one between the shoulders, the other right spang in the middle of her tight ass. Exactly where I’d wanted. Instantly, her breeches and shirt vanished in twin puffs of black and silver Chaos Magic.
To give the bully her due, she had a banging bod. If she had been left completely nude, it wouldn’t have really been so bad for her. However, I had not vanished her sword belt or boots, and somehow this left her looking plain ridiculous.
For a second, there was a stunned silence. The blonde woman looked down, made aware of her missing garments, I imagine, by the sudden chill.
Then, there was laughter.
The blonde, orange-skinned chick whirled on the spot, her face outraged—and caught me looking entirely too self-satisfied with what I had done.
“You!” she hissed.
The gong started peeling away, marking what would have been the end of the class had Preceptor Ipheca not ended it early.
As the gong continued to ring, Penelope scooted past me. My spidey senses tingling, I thought I better follow her.
I trailed Penelope as she dashed through the nearest open doorway that led back into the main castle of the Drako Academy. Behind us, the extremely pissed off voice of the dragonmancer who had been mocking Penelope followed us.
The words were unintelligible—whether that was because the woman was swearing in another language or because she was just that supremely pissed, I couldn’t say—but they floated along behind us like weak ghosts as the two of us legged it into the torch-lit sanctuary of the castle corridors.
Penelope was quick on her feet, as fleet as a deer and twice as silent. I struggled to keep up with her, even with my dragon-enhanced speed. From my position in second place, just behind her, I could hear that Penelope was making strange little gulping noises.
Goddamn, I hope she isn’t crying, I suddenly thought. There were few situations that I didn’t back myself to handle, but a distraught and upset female was probably one of them.
However, I needn’t have worried.
As I ran around a corner, a blue hand shot out and grabbed me by the sleeve.
Penelope was standing in the shadowy recesses of a statue of a dragon. When I looked at her, I saw that there were tears in her eyes but, happily, they appeared to be tears of mirth.
“Oh my—oh my goodness,” she choked, trying to squeeze out words around her laughter. “That was—that was a superlative bit—bit of magic, Mike!”
I grinned down at her and sketched a bow. “Anything for you, your Librarianship,” I said.
Penelope put her hands up against my chest, like she was trying to use me to steady herself. She rested her head against my pecs and shook it. Then she looked up at me through bright eyes filled with laughter and, I thought, mischief.
“Speaking of libraries,” she said. “Come with me! I must pay you back for what you did!”
I put up a casual hand and waved it. “You don’t need to pay me back for anything,” I said. “You’re my friend. You showed me nothing but patience and kindness during my induction, when I was asking you all those annoying questions. I will always have your back, Pen, so don’t worry about it.”
“No, no,” Penelope said, taking my hand and pulling me down the corridor. “Please, come with me. I want to show you something. I—I think that you’ll like it. I hope you will.”
Such was her obvious eagerness and enthusiasm to show me whatever it was that she thought I’d like to see, that I followed her. I wore a bemused smile as she skipped ahead of me.
The blue-skinned Knowledge Sprite led me through a series of back passages that I would have got lost in on my own, until we emerged into one of the main corridors that I recognized as leading toward the Grand Library.
We turned the far corner of this dragon-sized corridor—designed after the Drako Academy had last been stormed so that dragons could fight inside as well as outside—and found ourselves facing the gigantic and
beautiful door to the Grand Library.
Penelope led the way through the smaller, everyday side door and into the great, glass-domed expanse beyond. I barely had time to glance up at the insanely intricate metal and glass ceiling that depicted dragonmancers in full flight, before Penelope had grabbed me and towed me into a deserted row of books.
“I—I want to show you something—give you something,” the Librarian Knowledge Sprite said to me. “In appreciation what you did for me. You defended me in front of everyone,”
“I told you, you don’t have—” I tried to reply.
“No, I want to,” Penelope insisted.
“Okay then.”
Penelope pointed to an official looking door on the other side of the library. It didn’t have a sign on it, but if it did it would have been one reading “STAFF ONLY.”
“That’s my private study chamber,” she said. “When I have closed the door behind me, count to sixty and let yourself in. Make sure you close the door behind you. What I’m about to show is not for the eyes of anyone else. Understand?”
I frowned a little but nodded all the same. Was Penelope about to show me something pertinent to the Bloodletters or the crystal? No, that wasn’t right. She couldn’t have known that either of those two things were subjects of interest for me. Then what the hell was it?
“We will know soon enough,” Noctis said sagely from within his crystal.
I couldn’t argue with that.
Penelope hurried away, fumbled with a lock on the door and let herself in. I began to count down from sixty.
I moved slowly toward the door, my brain fizzing with the possibilities of what the knowledgeable woman might be waiting to show or tell me.
Four… three… two… one… zero.
