Alchemist Illusion (The Alchemist Book 3)

by Dan Michaelson

  “My sister and I are from the Barlands. Well, not exactly the Barlands, but a village near enough to it. The Academy doesn’t often send testers out to us.”

  She frowned again and focused on his hand, staring at him intently.

  Strangely, he thought that he could feel something within the vrandal, some energy coming off of it. He tried to understand what that was but couldn’t be certain.

  It was her silence that bothered him.

  Lilith had remained nearly completely silent. She didn’t look up at him, and he didn’t see any glow around her to suggest that she was using alchemy, arcane arts, or something else.

  It was just silence.

  “What do you want with me?” he asked.

  “Do you feel I’m harming you somehow?”

  Sam regarded her for a moment. They had fed him. Kept him locked in a room. Prevented him from truly using the power of the vrandal. They hadn’t harmed him, but they were trying to use him. He was sure of it.

  “Other than when I was first captured? No.”

  Initially, there been the strange friction, that rubbing sensation, and the energy of the man who had been responsible for it. There had been the torment and the laughter, and then he remembered nothing. After that… They had done nothing to him.

  Why?

  Lilith watched him. Sam turned his attention out into the distance. Taking a step forward, he moved out onto the path, inhaling the smells of the pine trees. The wind swirled around him, and he ignored the pulsing of the vrandal that pressed against him. The power of it was an irritant. Without realizing what he was doing, he reached for it and started to remove it.

  He quickly stopped himself. Removing it was even more of a danger. If he took it off, then someone else might be able to use it. The vrandal had bonded to him, and he had expended so much effort to reconnect to it. He owed it to Havash and Chasten and even Tara to hold on to the power within it and to make sure that the vrandal remained connected to him. They had gone through great lengths to keep it with him.

  Lilith watched him as he debated. This was a different sort of torment. That was what this had to be. She tested him, used some strange power against him. It was that power, that friction he had to be careful with. It was a measure of control.

  “What are you trying to do to me?” Sam asked.

  It wasn’t the kind of torment he had expected. Then again, he was fully prepared for the Nighlan to torture information out of him.

  “I’m trying to open your mind,” she said. “Because if you fail at this…”

  She let the words trailed off, though he wondered what she might do and wondered why it might be significant.

  What would happen if he failed?

  She seemed to want him to find some power within himself.

  Chasten had made a point of telling him that he believed there was some power within Sam, some power that was similar to the true alchemists that had served in the Academy, but without anyone there to teach him, how was Sam to understand what it was, or to find that power within himself?

  “Why do you need me?”

  “Because you have demonstrated that you can be useful.”

  “What for?”

  “Apparently nothing.” Lilith turned away from him, heading back into the building.

  He was hesitant here.

  She was trying to get through him differently.

  He wasn’t sure what she was doing, and he wasn’t sure how she intended to use him, but he was increasingly convinced that was her goal. There might not be any way for her to use him easily, but what was she trying to accomplish here?

  Sam turned away, looking out toward the opening. If she was going to allow him to leave, then why should he stay?

  He jogged forward.

  Sam slammed into an invisible barrier. He bounced off and landed on the ground.

  This one hurt more than the last one.

  Somewhere nearby, the familiar sound of irritating laughter built. The same man who had captured him beneath the Academy was watching. Sam got to his feet slowly, rubbing his head. Everything seemed to swim through his blurry vision, and he felt a bit dizzy.

  He ignored it and called upon the power of the vrandal, letting energy roll through him. Instead of releasing it, he held it inside. It combated the strange friction he detected. Sam ran his hand along the surface of the barrier, tracing its contours. He thought he should recognize something to it, but as he held on to it, he couldn’t tell what that was.

  Power. But what kind? It was different than the magic used in the Academy, different even than that used for Alchemy. Could it be tied to the friction he detected?

  He pressed the vrandal against the barrier, and it felt like it was being repelled. As Sam continued trying to find his way through it, he found himself digging deeper into some source of power within himself. Without meaning to, he blasted energy outward, and a shimmering green fog exploded all along the barrier.

  Sam was trapped. The size of the cell might have been different, but the end results were the same. For what purpose, though?

  The sound of laughter persisted and followed him as he headed back toward the building. The tower loomed over him, an enormous circular stone building with rectangular wings made of the same black rock. Everything about it appeared dark and foreboding, and everything about it left him with a feeling of dread. Heading back inside meant that he was going toward danger, but what choice did he have?

  Every so often, Sam paused and looked at the path leading into the trees. He didn’t see the man—the source of the laughter—which made it worse.

  By the time he reached the main part of the building, he found Lilith waiting for him. Watching him. She didn’t seem surprised that he returned.

  Chapter Eleven

  A single dark cloud covered the entire sky. Thunder rumbled every so often, an explosion of power that left everything around him shaking with energy. When lightning struck, Sam stared expectantly at the sky, but no rain came.

  He sat on a chair in a room at the top of the tower, the almanac resting on his lap. At this point, Sam thought that he had been through most of it and had begun to feel like he was missing something.

  The vrandal allowed him to read the pages, but the symbols had started to not make as much sense. Some of them seem to be for more than one word as if there was something within them that he had overlooked.

  And Sam had to figure out what it was, and why that was there, hidden within it.

  His mind kept going back to what had to be happening in Tavran. The city under siege, the Nighlan attacking.

  The memory of all the pages he’d read through stayed with him. His mind had begun cataloging everything, and even while he drifted off, he began to sort through what didn’t fit. Increasingly, there was more to it than he had anticipated. Still, he wished that he had a chance to work on many of these different patterns with Tara. He could only imagine what they did. His understanding of the arcane arts allowed him to at least visualize some of them so that he knew ones were defensive, which one seemed offense of, and which ones he couldn’t quite place.

  All of it was tied to the vrandal.

  Somehow, the vrandal was key to it.

  Daven had made it clear that the vrandal he possessed was one of the original. That made sense, especially as the almanac was within the Academy, but what didn’t make sense was why others wouldn’t work similarly. If alchemists were able to use the vrandal and recreate it well enough that they had similar power stored within it, it seemed to Sam that others should be able to read the almanac.

  He closed the almanac, got to his feet, and looked around. Frustration surged within him.

  Sam had been here for the better part of a week, confined to this tower. He hadn’t seen the man who had laughed at him. He hadn’t seen practically anyone.

  During that time, he couldn’t help but wonder what was happening back at the Academy.

  Sam took a deep breath and gazed out over the distan
ce. For all the darkness, there was something quite amazing about the way the sky looked. The occasional bursts of lightning illuminated the clouds, opening up the sky and giving a hint of a greater world beyond. Not that he could reach it. The barriers placed here kept him confined, stronger than any he’d dealt with while in the Academy. At least there, he had the vrandal to navigate through places he wouldn’t otherwise be able to reach. Here it served no purpose other than to let him stretch for power. Even that hadn’t done much for him.

  Another burst of lightning came, followed by a steady rumble of thunder.

  “It can be beautiful.”

  Sam turned. Lilith stood near the entrance to the tower, her black dress fluttering in the wind. Her black hair was braided and tied back, exposing her long neck.

  “I’ve always enjoyed watching storms,” he admitted.

  “Why do you think that is?” she asked, tilting her head inquisitively.

  “There were storms near my home when I was a child. Most people didn’t care for them. They could be violent.” He closed his eyes, thinking back to a simpler time. “I didn’t love the rain, but the thunder and the lightning…”

  He opened his eyes, looking out into the distance. He’d been trying to figure out where they’d brought him and hadn’t been able to do so. There wasn’t anything about this place that he recognized, where even the smells were unfamiliar to him.

  But the nature of the storms? Sam had seen storms like that before. They always came out of the Barlands, the energy crackling over that land and leaving it quaking.

  That couldn’t be it, could it?

  But as he stared at it, he remembered those storms.

  He had seen storms just like that, though it had been a while. Sam had thought that he was done with them, that he had left that place behind. Perhaps he had not.

  “Am I in the Barlands?”

  Lilith looked over at him, watching him for a long moment. “How long have you been here?”

  “A week.”

  “Perhaps. In that time, have you seen the storms?”

  Sam nodded. “You know I have.”

  He suspected that Lilith knew exactly what he’d been doing, the way he’d taken to coming up here—a place where the barriers seemed willing to allow him, mostly because there would be no way for him to escape from here. He spent much of his time looking out over the expanse of this land, feeling the power here and watching the storms.

  “It’s taken you this long to make the connection,” she said.

  “I didn’t expect to be here.”

  “You grew up in the Barlands and didn’t recognize it?”

  Sam frowned, shaking his head. “I didn’t grow up here, just nearby.” They had been on the border of the Barlands, though enough people considered it the same. The Barlands were a hilly area, just beyond Erstan, and dangerous to near impassible. It was why it made sense for Olway to have annexed it. The Nighlan wouldn’t be able to cross it easily.

  At least, that was what he had believed.

  “Perhaps I was mistaken,” Lilith said.

  “Why did you bring me here?”

  “Because of what you did.”

  It was the first time that she’d offered him any measure of an answer, and for the first time, Sam began to question whether she had some other motive beyond simply trying to steal the vrandal in the almanac from him.

  “You want the almanac?” He glanced down at it, feeling a pulse of the vrandal and the way that it radiated some sense of power to him.

  Lilith looked at it, her gaze lingering for a long moment. “What do you know of it?”

  “I know that it is alchemy, and that it was written with alchemy, so it requires the key to unlock the secrets it holds.” There was no point in denying that to her, as he had strongly suspected she knew. However, a part of Sam wondered if the vrandal and the almanac were linked to him in some way.

  Lilith’s gaze drifted down to the almanac. “A simple explanation, but perhaps not untrue.”

  “Simple?”

  In Sam’s mind, it was anything but simple. The almanac was alchemy. There was nothing simple about it. As far as he knew, the alchemy that had gone into creating it was incredibly complicated.

  “A simplistic response,” Lilith said. She sounded disappointed. “What has your experience with it been?”

  “That anyone would do whatever they could to acquire the power of it.”

  “I’m sure they have,” Lilith agreed.

  “The Nighlan have tried several times to acquire both the almanac and the vrandal.” He looked down at his hand, and the vrandal glowed softly, the light a deep green as it often was. “And now you have done the same.”

  She clasped her hands behind her back and headed to the edge of the tower. The wind whipped around her, and she breathed in deeply. With how close to the edge of the tower as she stood, Sam wondered if he could trigger the vrandal, sending a blast of power out from it and knock her over the edge. Maybe she would fall, and whatever barrier she held would disappear. Then he could escape and return to the Academy.

  But something held him back.

  Maybe it was simply the idea of harming someone. Maybe something deeper.

  “The almanac isn’t why we have you here, despite what you might believe,” Lilith said.

  When he was silent, she turned back to him.

  “You don’t believe me.”

  “As I told you, I’ve seen others willing to kill for the power of the almanac. For the alchemy. The Nighlan want it so that they can unlock the secrets of alchemy.”

  She nodded. “Perhaps. But I brought you here for a different reason.”

  Lilith turned away and faced out over the distance. Thunder rumbled somewhere, the sound shaking the entire tower. Lightning from the street to the sky, bright bursts illuminating everything. Sam wrapped his arms around himself and the almanac. So far, no rain had fallen. If they were in the Barlands, as she said, it would be powerful and plentiful.

  After a moment, he breathed out and joined Lilith.

  “I’ve often found the contours of the storms beautiful.”

  Sam glanced over to her. “Contours?”

  “Watch the lightning and see how it outlines the clouds. You can almost envision something more within them.”

  There was something that she said that triggered a memory of the storms when he was younger. Standing inside of the broken palace with Mia, looking out through the metal, watching the sky, thankful that they had shelter over their head. “I was always thankful for protection while I watched the colors.”

  Lilith frowned as she looked at him. “The colors are but a part of something more.”

  When another burst of lightning came, it left a bluish-purple hue to the sky, giving him an after image that Sam held onto. Strangely, with each burst, he could feel that energy flow, almost in a way that was meant to pull on his senses. It was as if the power he detected was potent enough for him to feel—and even use.

  The vrandal pulsed in his hand. It had been doing that more often since he had been captured.

  He wasn’t sure why, or what it meant—or perhaps it was nothing more than a signal, calling out to others that Sam had been captured. Regardless, at this point, the only thing that mattered was that he could feel it.

  After a while, he slipped the vrandal off.

  When he did, something changed. Power continued to build around him, but no longer did he feel the same friction that he had been feeling before. For a moment, he was worried Lilith would grab for the vrandal or almanac, but she made no effort to do either.

  The storm crackled around him, the rumbling sensation continuing to build and the storm echoing. Lightning danced in the sky. It illuminated the landscape beautifully and violently.

  After a moment, he started to slip the vrandal back on. Given what he had gone through and everything that it had taken to reform the connection between him and the vrandal, he felt as if he needed to have it.

  �
�Don’t,” Lilith said. She didn’t turn in his direction and faced out over the storm. The wind pulled at her braided hair and whipped at her gown. “You don’t need it.”

  Sam looked down at the vrandal. With each burst of lightning, the color within it began to shimmer. He could see hints of green, the same hue he knew to associate with alchemy. “I need the vrandal to understand the almanac.”

  “Do you?”

  He didn’t want to admit the truth, that he had started to find some answers, though he wasn’t sure if she would even believe him.

  “The vrandal is the key.”

  Lilith turned to him and held his gaze. Her eyes were deep blue, and as lightning flashing reflected within them, it seemed almost as if there was power surging behind her eyes. She didn’t glow with any of the other powers that he saw, though.

  “The vrandal is the key,” Lilith agreed. “And not only to the almanac.”

  She held her hand, and he realized that she had a vrandal.

  Sam found himself drawn to the one that she wore. The man that had abducted him had called his a trinket. Why would he make fun of the vrandal if Lilith had one?

  “Do you know where yours came from?” she asked.

  “The alchemy tower,” he said.

  She smiled tightly. “Perhaps. Yours is old. Impossibly old.”

  Sam looked down at the vrandal. It was the same thing the Daven had said to him. He had claimed that Sam had one of the original vrandals and that it had been used to replicate others.

  Was that what she was getting at?

  “I don’t know anything about it, other than that it was stored within the alchemy tower. Some of the other alchemists told me that the vrandal was used to replicate others.”

  She sniffed. “Pale copies,” she said. “And for a different purpose. They believed they could trap power in them and gift them to those without power.”

  “The alchemists trained at the Academy. They would have their own power.”

  “I mean a different kind of power,” Lilith said, her words soft, slightly clipped, and edged with a hint of disdain. She held out her hand, showing the vrandal. “This one is the sibling of yours. There should be one other.”