She flushed slightly, though that might’ve only been from the effort of trying to use the power she had. A sheen of sweat glistened on her brow. “It wasn’t easy.”
“No. It wouldn’t have been easy to hold on to what must have been two distinct flows and turn them the way you did.”
“Three,” Tara said.
Havash turned toward her, his eyebrows raised. “Three? That would be more than… Well, that is impressive.”
Sam smiled as he looked over at Tara. He was proud of her and proud of her knowledge of angulation, and proud of how quickly she’d mastered different aspects of the complicated angulation they were working through.
“Something like that might have been enough to scare away someone who recognized that power, but I am not sure that is what happened.”
Havash crouched forward. Power trickled from him and continued to radiate outward into the hearth, enough that Sam could feel it. Sam saw nothing from the hearth that would suggest any damage, but the blast of power had seemed like it would have been incredibly destructive.
“What do you think happened, then?” Sam asked.
“What she performed would have destroyed your attacker.”
Havash said it so quickly that Sam wasn’t sure he’d heard right. “Destroyed?” Sam whispered, looking back at Tara. She’d gone white and clutched her hands to her chest. “It didn’t do anything to the hearth.”
“I doubt that it would,” Havash said. “The contours of the connection you were using suggest that it was designed to affect only living things. A nasty piece of angulation, and unfortunately quite necessary at times.”
Sam paled as well. What would have happened had that power struck him instead of the attacker? It was possible the vrandal would have offered him some sort of protection, but what if it had not? Tara would have killed him.
That had to be what she was thinking about.
“Why would there even be anything like that in the almanac?” Sam asked.
Havash looked up. He had practically crawled into the hearth, getting close enough that he could press his face into the depths of it. “Why? There have been countless reasons why over the years, but in your case, I think the only reason you need to know about is the Nighlan.”
“You’d simply kill them?”
Havash got to his feet, dusting his hands across his robes. “What do you think they would do to you were they to capture you, Samran? You’ve already seen what people like Ben, Ferand, and even Bethal would do when given the chance. They were willing to attack you to strip you of the vrandal. There is nothing kind in them, nothing redeeming. They must be stopped before they harm again.”
There was a part of Sam that knew and understood that, but at the same time, it was difficult for him to realize that they might need to fight… and to kill.
“What else have you been working on?” Havash asked.
“I…”
“I’m sure there are other techniques on neighboring pages.”
“There was a shield.”
Havash frowned. “A shield? Show me.”
Tara closed her eyes, and power began to flow from her quickly, almost as if she wanted to get it over with as fast as possible. The power exploded outward, forming the shield.
Havash gasped. “This is even more impressive than the last.”
“Move to the side of it,” Sam said.
Havash looked over at him, then took a step to the side and looked at Tara. He cocked his head one way and then another, watching her as he did. “Very interesting.”
With a burst of arcane arts, he slammed energy toward her. It dissipated across the shield she held.
Havash traced his fingers along the surface of the shield until it started to sizzle. Power flashed for a moment before fading. “Interesting. This is quite a unique form of a shield, though I suspect you’re aware of that.”
“We weren’t really aware of anything,” Sam said.
“The nature of this shield is such that it doesn’t allow a side attack. If you see how it curves around her, you can see how she is protected from such damage. Very useful.”
They had gone through the almanac and found varying different patterns of different usefulness. At this point, Sam had no idea how many of the patterns were for violent means and how many of them were for more defensive measures. Increasingly, he started to question whether the kind of patterns they were using were more violent. More dangerous.
“If the Nighlan continue to press, we are going to need as much understanding of the almanac as possible. When the alchemists were intact, it was not a problem.”
“I would’ve expected the almanac to describe ways of creating alchemy,” Sam said.
“There are those in there, as well,” he replied.
Sam frowned, glancing to the almanac. “That’s not what I’ve seen.”
“I don’t know what to say about that,” Havash said. “All I know is what we have learned about the almanac previously.”
Why would it be different for them?
Sam glanced at the vrandal and couldn’t help but wonder if it had something to do with him.
Maybe because he didn’t have any arcane arts.
Havash paused, looking between them both. “You need to keep working through the almanac as much as you can. When you find something useful, you need to share it.”
Sam looked over at Tara. She’d been unusually silent, and he thought he knew why.
“We still don’t know anything about the attacker,” Sam said.
“Perhaps we will not,” Havash said. “We’ve done what we can to make certain the Academy is as protected as possible. I have personally placed most of the protections, but these are the Nighlan, and with the power they have access to, along with what Bethal knows, there’s still danger.”
“How are we going to stop them?”
“You are both students. There is no we in this.”
Sam started to argue, and Havash raised his hand.
“The two of you have been quite useful. None deny this, but with the growing threat of the Nighlan along our borders, and an increasing threat coming off of them, we need to have fully trained users of the arcane arts.”
Sam glanced over at Tara. What was she other than an advanced and fully trained user?
Tara said she was using arcane arts that were more complicated than anything she learned in her advanced seminars.
Even that wasn’t what bothered him.
It was his own helplessness.
He wanted to be a part of it. And he couldn’t.
Tara kept trying to tell him that he had to have some access to the arcane arts, but it was negligible at best if he did. Not anything to be feared. And nothing that would be useful against the Nighlan.
“Return to your studies, both of you. I will let you know if there’s anything you need to do.”
Sam turned to Tara and took her hand, and they headed out of Havash’s office. He pulled her along the hall, down the stairs, and toward the main part of the Academy. She still hadn’t said much, and she didn’t resist him pulling her with him.
“Are you going to be okay?” he asked.
She sighed. “How can I? The pattern I used hurt someone, Sam. That’s not the kind of arcane arts I came to learn.” She blinked for a moment before shaking her head. “I didn’t want to hurt anyone.” Tara took a deep breath. “When I was offered a chance to come to the Academy, it was because of my talent. I’ve always known I have a connection to arcane arts, and that connection has allowed me to do things that others can’t. I thought…” She shook her head again. “It doesn’t matter what I thought.”
Sam wasn’t sure what she was going on about, but he did understand her concern about the kind of power they had used. The vrandal, and the almanac, released powerful—almost uncontrolled—energy. To use it safely, they were going to have to come to terms with the kind of power that it permitted them to access and figure out what it would take for them to do so safely
.
Another thought came to Sam, though, and it was one that he suspected Tara didn’t necessarily share with him.
If that kind of power would permit us to defend ourselves against the Nighlan, wasn’t there value in learning how to use it?
They had already suffered multiple Nighlan attacks. They had come frequently, often, and they had come with destructive force. The Nighlan had not cared who they harmed or whether anyone suffered.
If they weren’t careful, the Academy itself might be destroyed.
Selfishly, it left him wondering where he would go.
“We can work with it safely,” he said. “Besides, I think if we keep studying it, we can figure out the secret of the writing.”
“It can’t be some sort of game to you,” Tara said.
He looked over to her, frowning. “It’s not a game,” he said. “It’s just that I understand that we will need to work with this as much as possible.”
“I hope that’s all it is.”
He looked over, holding her gaze, but there was a troubled expression in her eyes. Sam realized there wasn’t going to be anything that he could say to help alleviate that.
Chapter Three
Sam worked his way through angulation. He had a stack of books next to him on the desk, all of them on more advanced angulation, and they were learning them in their first-year class. Still, now that he had spoken to Professor Clarice about his interest, along with demonstrating his potential—at least a theoretical potential—Sam had been permitted to access some of the more advanced textbooks. He was thankful that she hadn’t questioned him, hadn’t pressed him to try to prove his ability, but also wondered if perhaps she might push him to demonstrate a practical approach.
James looked over at him. He was thinner than he had been when they had first entered the Academy. There was more tension in his eyes, though these days, many within the Academy had some tension, mostly tied to the attacks. Most of the students chose not to talk about them, as if they were afraid that doing so would reveal something about themselves. Either some deficit or that they were not strong enough to withstand the dangers that existed within the Academy—and their use of the arcane arts.
“You’re not even listening,” James said.
Sam looked over to Professor Clarice. She had her back to them and was going on about one aspect of the third tenet of angulation, but it was still basic. The tenets of angulation were all tied to helping understand how somebody could use the power that the arcane arts permitted. However, even though Sam had an understanding of those tenets, he still couldn’t do anything with it.
“I’m paying attention,” he muttered.
“Barely,” James whispered. He leaned forward and kept his gaze focused straight ahead as if doing so would keep Professor Clarice from knowing that they were having a quiet conversation, but Sam had realized that Professor Clarice was at least clever enough to know when students were paying attention. He might be given a pass, but it was possible that James would not. “I don’t even know why you bother coming to class anyway. If she has given you study material, and it’s more than what she is talking about here, you could just study outside of class.”
Sam knew that he could. And James was the first person to suggest that to him, to argue that perhaps his not attending class would make the most sense. These days, with him having advanced beyond what he could learn and most of his classes, he had started to have the same question for himself. Why did he come?
There wasn’t a real clear answer.
Part of it was because he felt as if he needed to maintain the appearances, partly because he wanted to be here. Partly it was because he feared what would happen if he were sent away from the Academy.
He often felt as if he didn’t really belong here, so his attendance in class allowed him to spend time with classmates and to at least have some semblance of fitting in, even if he wasn’t entirely sure that he did. Most of the time, he didn’t feel as if he fit in.
“Professor Clarice wanted me here,” Sam said.
That wasn’t untrue. Then again, she also hadn’t said that she wanted him to attend this particular class.
Tara had suggested that he push to be placed into one of the more advanced classes, but Sam hadn’t done so yet. Not because he feared that, at least, not really. It was just that if he were to go into one of the more advanced classes, there was a real possibility that he would be expected to demonstrate the practical approach to angulation.
But it was more than just that. It would separate him from others within the Academy even more than he already had been.
He was holding on. Mostly it was to a dream, a possibility—something that he had never really believed that he could even have—but now that he was here, it was that dream that he wanted.
It was a dream the Nighlan threatened to disrupt. With each attack and each time that Sam got involved in things like that, he found himself increasingly called out, increasingly separated, and increasingly feeling like he was not a part of the Academy, though that was because he was not.
Professor Clarice turned back to the class. “Today, we are going to try a different approach. As we are getting you ready for your exams, when you must prove that you can demonstrate greater knowledge of the tenets of angulation, you will need to show more proficiency with the technique involved in angulation.”
Technique meant practical approach. Was that what she was implying now?
Tara had suggested that he would not need to demonstrate any practical approach to angulation, and that he could get by without revealing anything.
And he had allowed himself to think that he could get away with it.
What had he been thinking?
How could he have escaped that?
“I would like you to work with the person at your table, and together you will work through a series of angulation patterns that you will see in Chapter Fifteen of this year’s textbook. If you have any questions, you may approach the front of the room, but I would caution you to be careful, as you will need to navigate through a barrage of potential missteps with angulation. The tables are designed to help contain any mistakes you might make, but unfortunately, accidents do happen.”
She fell silent, taking a seat at the desk, and all around them a buzz of noise began to build.
James looked over to Sam. He shifted his robes, the green stripe in it facing the wrong direction until he adjusted.
“This is the first time that she has actually had us use anything,” he said. “I thought that we were going to get through the entire first year without needing to actually demonstrate any proficiency.”
“I know,” Sam muttered.
“You know,” James said, leaning toward him, lowering his voice conspiratorially, “I heard a rumor that the instructors have decided that they need to teach us more defensive arcane arts than usual. I wonder if this has anything to do with that. There have been too many attempts on students, and it sounds like they are trying to be ready for more.”
Sam wouldn’t put it past Havash to have made those arrangements, especially given that Havash would have been concerned about what had been taking place. How could he not? With two attacks on the Academy, and the danger of the Nighlan ever-present, they had to be ready.
“What do you think we will be working on from Chapter Fifteen?” James asked, pulling the book open.
“You need to create a singular line with the arcane arts, angulated ninety degrees, and then another ninety degrees, and finish with two inversions at forty-five degrees,” Sam said, repeating what he knew to be in that section. There was more, but it was really no more complicated than that.
“Are you kidding?” James asked, looking through the book, and that he paused, skimming through. “You’re not kidding. How did you remember that?”
“I’ve told you,” Sam said, rolling eyes.
James leaned forward. “You really do remember almost everything that you read. You know, with your test scores,
I thought that you had to have a pretty good memory, but that is a little disturbing if I’m honest.”
Sam frowned, arching a brow. “Why is that disturbing?”
“It’s disturbing in that you can remember all of that without even trying. I mean, you barely had to think.”
“I can’t do it, though,” he said. “I mean, I don’t have enough control over the arcane arts to replicate what is there.”
“Maybe I can work with you like you work with me, and we can figure this out together.”
He shrugged.
James stared at the book for a few moments, resting his hands on the table. “All right,” he started, “so I need to use the third tenet of angulation, and I need to call upon a singular line, and then begin to turn it outward, ambulating at ninety degrees…”
He started to glow softly with the power of the arcane arts. Even though he had been working with angulation, or much with the arcane arts, in the time that Sam had been in the Academy, he had seen almost everybody improve. He suspected some of that was done outside of the classroom setting, and some of it was probably tied to simply the mental training they went through. There was something to be said about using what was learned here, training a person’s mind, and becoming organized in their thinking. It permitted the students to better utilize what they had learned and allowed them to know the connection they had more effectively. It made it so that when they finally began to use more advanced techniques, the angulation they were expected to utilize would be more effective.
“I can’t make this first ninety-degree angulation,” he said.
James suddenly sat back, and when he did, Sam noticed a burst of pale white light that exploded away from him, and it slammed into nothing.
He had expected that it would go shooting across the classroom, but it didn’t.
Sam frowned, and he turned, looking at the table.
He had never really paid much attention to it. The tables were weathered, old, but stout. And Professor Clarice had claimed that they were protected so that angulation wouldn’t go astray.
Alchemist Illusion (The Alchemist Book 3) Page 3
