by Andrew Rowe
“Not until I’ve decided if I’m going to work here.”
He deflated a little, but nodded. “Fine, fine. If you insist.”
“…But I’d be more inclined toward accepting if you teach me that attunement component visualization spell and how to identify those component runes, so I can try it on myself.”
“Hm.” He rubbed at his chin. “I guess I’m not technically disallowed from teaching you that. And if you might work here…I guess you’re going to need to learn it eventually.”
I grinned. “Excellent. Shall we get started?”
***
Learning the “Analyze Attunement Composition” spell was surprisingly straightforward. It required putting my hand on the attunement, then pushing mental mana into the attunement, then creating a “link” between that mental mana and my mind.
It reminded me of my mana threads, but internal, rather than external. The same could be done with other people’s attunements, but the process would require overwhelming any magical defenses on the target. Physical contact was generally required for that sort of thing, at least at my level.
The difficult part wasn’t establishing that connection — it was being able to parse through the runes that appeared in my mind.
While the core concept of attunements being composed of a set of enchantments was simple, the reality of it was somewhat more challenging.
Each individual function — like, say, shroud generation — wasn’t just one rune. It was a set of rune-like symbols, and every single symbol within that set also had symbols inside it, which I could see if I focused my mind hard enough. Those internal symbols were an entirely new language that I couldn’t read, similar to the glyphs I’d seen Ashon looking at.
And with that, I began to understand the problem, and the tremendous amount of effort that must have gone into creating these artificial attunements in the first place.
“So, to make these artificial attunements, you’re basically having to decrypt what each individual attunement function does, then figure out how to duplicate it.”
Ashon nodded. “Exactly! And the larger the set of existing attunements we have to research, the more functions we can draw from in creating artificial attunements. Of course, it would be much more exciting to write new attunement functions from scratch…”
“Which is what you were working on. Got it. But what was that spell, exactly?”
“It was a verification spell. It’s designed for checking if a specific sub-glyph combination produces a valid result.”
I raised an eyebrow at that. “How can a spell verify that anything would work without actually testing it on a person or item?”
“Don’t know, exactly. I didn’t make the spell. The spell connects to some kind of external knowledge source to get the answer. Where that knowledge is located…” Ashon shrugged at me.
Hm. Maybe he’s drawing information directly from one of those dominions that Keras is always talking about. If there’s a dominion of knowledge, it may have stored information on what valid rune combinations are…
“Can you teach me that spell?” I asked.
“Sorry, no. Not now, at least. That one is definitely a business secret. Maybe if you get hired and spend some time here.”
That was a bit disappointing, but I could understand why. Given that runes were often patented, a spell that checked the validity of sub-glyph combinations was a hugely valuable tool. Honestly, he probably shouldn’t have even told me the spell existed — which was presumably part of why Kahi was so irritated that he’d been tinkering with it.
“How about any other related spells?”
He considered that question. “Well, I can teach you Accelerated Computation. It’s pretty basic mental magic. You can use it to parse through sub-glyphs faster…but don’t use it for too long. It gives me awful headaches, and I’ve got a lot more mana than you do.”
He probably didn’t have a lot more mana than I did, but I didn’t say that. I wasn’t sure how much he knew about my general capabilities and didn’t plan to offer any more information than I had to.
Even if I did have a decent supply of mana, I winced at the idea of straining my mind with something like that. It sounded horrifying, like exactly the sort of spell that could ruin my mind permanently. The fear of doing myself permanent cognitive damage was so great that it almost made me refuse the offer.
Almost.
As terrifying as the spell sounded, my mind was racing with possibilities for using it, too. This sounded exactly like the sort of spell that could be used to make my Haste more effective. It wouldn’t let me move organically under Haste like a perception spell would, but if I could perfectly compute exactly where to move…
“Yeah.” I nodded, my expression hardening as I considered. “Teach me that spell.”
***
By the time I headed home, I had a splitting headache from experimenting with mental mana spells, but for once, the abject horror at the possible consequences was overwhelmed by the sheer weight of potential benefits.
I’d learned so much.
It was still far from enough to actually try to make modifications to attunements, let alone try to make my own functions…but I’d cracked open my own attunements and looked inside. That was an enthralling concept.
Someday, I’ll do more than just take a look.
Ashon wasn’t patient enough to actually teach me any sub-glyphs, but he did hand me a book on the subject, and I’d greedily devoured everything I could. He hadn’t let me keep the book, but he said I could keep reading the next day if I came back.
So, I did.
I spent the next few days visiting the lab, studying, and asking more questions. Notably, I learned a little bit more about compound runes — runes with multiple functions. I’d heard about those before, and even seen a few, but I hadn’t previously understood how they worked.
Broadly speaking, any rune with multiple functions was a compound rune. This general term encompassed several different things, three of which were covered in my introductory lessons.
First and simplest were multi-runes. Multi-runes were the most common type, and they both looked and functioned much like typical runes, just with lots of lines to incorporate different features.
The most common multi-runes included capacity, recharge, and a single function of the same type. A basic example would be a rune with a regeneration function, a life mana recharge feature, and a life mana capacity feature. The rune for this would look like a regeneration function rune, but with an extra line for recharge and the extra bracket-looking lines around it for capacity. There would also be lines to signify the levels of each, if it’s a higher-than-Quartz enchantment.
The only thing missing from these common multi-runes is an activation rune, which is generally still separate. With a multi-rune like this and an activation rune, you can make a functional item with two runes instead of the standard four or more.
The idea behind multi-runes is simple enough: reducing the necessary number of runes for an Enchanter to draw in order to make enchanting faster and easier. They’re commonly used in mass-production for factory-made enchantments.
The problem is that multi-runes require all the necessary mana for any features in that rune. Let’s say an ordinary Carnelian-level regeneration item normally has three life-based runes — function, recharge, and capacity — each of which cost sixty mana to charge. A multi-rune incorporating all three would require the total mana for all three runes, or one-hundred and eighty mana. Thus, someone who is just at the cusp of Carnelian and only has sixty mana could make a standard item, but couldn’t afford the mana cost to make the multi-rune version.
Similarly, this means that any multi-rune item you’re making is — by necessity — going to be weaker than whatever your own maximum mana is, since you’re basically splitting your mana three ways to make it. For that reason, I didn’t envision myself making a lot of multi-rune items. I preferred to take the time to put the strongest in
dividual runes on an item that I could afford. The only exception was emergency situations, like when I made my rock of regeneration to help Vera. In that kind of scenario, slapping a multi-rune onto an item might be a good approach.
Next, there were runestones. The term “runestone” was something of a misnomer, as it didn’t necessarily refer to stones: rather, it was a term for any form of rune crafted in three-dimensions rather than two. These were extremely complex and I didn’t get a good idea of how they worked, but the general idea was that they worked something like multi-runes, but with a vastly greater number of available features. Presumably, this was due to the higher number of visual permutations available on three-dimensional figure, but I didn’t find a lot of details. They were very rarely used by ordinary Enchanters due to prohibitive mana costs and raw material requirements.
I’d seen runestones before without knowing what they were, most notably in the prison within the spire where I’d first met Vera and Keras. I hoped to study those eventually, but for the moment, I had a higher priority. I was much more interested in the third and final type of compound runes that I’d learned about: dynamic runes.
Dynamic runes were the type of compound runes that worked the most similarly to attunements. A dynamic rune did absolutely nothing on its own. Instead, a dynamic rune was “primed” to accept sub-glyphs of the appropriate element. You can think of a dynamic rune as being like an empty container for magical functions. Once you had charged a dynamic rune with mana, you could use a spell called “Apply Sub-Glyphs” to “write” the sub-glyphs for the dynamic rune. This wouldn’t change the dynamic rune’s outward appearance unless you added a function specifically for that.
I researched the Apply Sub-Glyphs spell and figured out how to use it; it was basically an extension of the Analyze Attunement Composition spell I’d already been working on. Relatedly, sub-glyphs could also be edited after being written by using the Analyze Attunement Composition spell. (Really, “Analyze Attunement Composition” should have been named “Analyze Sub-Glyphs”, but I digress.)
While dynamic runes were theoretically usable by any Enchanter, they had several downsides. The main issue was needing to learn a significant amount of sub-glyph language just to make basic functions. Apparently, just figuring out how to make something as simple as a dueling cane through dynamic runes generally took years of study.
Due to their complexity, dynamic runes were also prone to failures and accidents. It was easy to make a dynamic rune that didn’t do anything at all due to an error in sub-glyph language. More serious mistakes could cause deadly consequences: a failure to write a proper capacity function could make the whole item explode, for example.
Beyond that, there was also making sure that the dynamic rune was set up to hold the right amount of mana for any functions that were written in it, which was a complex endeavor in itself.
All in all, most Enchanters would never bother using dynamic runes, but I absolutely planned to study them. They had the potential to allow for levels of customization that I found enthralling, but I knew that it would be a significant amount of time before I was writing any on my own.
Visually, a dynamic rune looked a lot like a single rune for an element, but with unique pointed symbols above and below.
The knowledge of how compound runes worked opened some doors in my mind. I’d known Selys-Lyann had too few runes on it to handle the types of abilities it provided, and I’d suspected they were compound, but I didn’t have any way of evaluating them properly before. Now, I could eventually plan to analyze their sub-glyphs to figure out more about how the sword functioned.
Maybe I’ll be able to figure out how to interface with the sword’s spirit functions and get better control of it…but I probably should wait a while.
Once I crack that, though…maybe I can start making some of these myself. I wonder if there’s a class on this for second year students. I’d better pick up all the books I can here in case there isn’t.
Either way, learning this is going to take a while.
Sub-glyphs were an entire language, after all, and I was prioritizing studying the sub-glyphs related to attunement functions. Compound runes were another entire field of research.
I learned enough to understand some of the basic sub-glyphs within each of the major functions of my own attunements, but even as the end of the week approached, I wasn’t at all confident in my ability to tinker with anything safely.
That was, of course, exactly what Annabelle Farren must have wanted.
She’d given me bait. Just enough information to realize the vast potential of learning sub-glyphs and getting involved with modifying attunements, but not enough to do it myself.
And even if I’d learned the details of the sub-glyphs, the rest of the week made it clear that I didn’t actually have the resources to make entirely new attunements on my own.
They didn’t show me the whole process — trade secrets and all that — but they did show me enough to understand that it was expensive.
They had a facility for creating attunement primers, which were basically the same thing as that liquid I’d taken from the spire and given to Sera. That primer itself was tremendously expensive, but cheap compared to the rest of the process.
The more expensive part was creating what they called an “attunement application enchantment”.
Basically, it was an enchantment that, when activated, cast a spell on someone and gave them the desired attunement after they drank the primer. The component parts necessary to create that enchantment were colossally expensive. The most obvious were Class 4 mana crystals for every mana type the attunement was giving out, as well as several more crystals for other functions.
Then, there was the cost of the “applicator”, the device that was used to apply the enchantment itself. Those were also extremely expensive because they were made from a rare material (they wouldn’t tell me what it was) with a tremendously high mana capacity, which was necessary to hold all of the functions for the attunement application enchantment.
The end of the process created an attunement vial – a vial of liquid holding a primer, with a cap that served as an applicator. To gain an artificial attunement, someone would drink the primer, then press the applicator cap against their body and speak a command word, activating the applicator and creating the artificial attunement.
This also had to be done in a safe environment, often with other spells being used to suppress existing attunements to avoid interference with the process — otherwise you could get things like Sera’s contracts interfering and causing bad things to happen when someone drank the primer.
All in all? The cost of a single artificial attunement was absolutely ludicrous. They weren’t generally sold to the public — only to people like corporate investors, national leaders, and military officials — but when they were sold, it was for hundreds of thousands of silver. That was comparable to multiple Emerald-level items or at least a city block worth of property.
I had absolutely no hope of affording to buy something like that. Even buying the component parts and trying to make the applicator myself was both well beyond my finances and beyond my enchanting ability. Each of the component enchantments for making an applicator was somewhere in the Citrine range.
Which is, of course, how Caelford — which didn’t ordinarily get Enchanters from their local spire — managed to hook a number of promising Enchanters into working on their projects.
“If an Enchanter works here for four years,” Kahi explained, “they get an artificial attunement vial, as well as free use of our facilities to apply the vial to themselves or a chosen recipient. I’m sure by now you understand exactly how good of a deal that is. And as an Arbiter, we’re willing to offer you something extra if you agree to work with us.”
With two days left of my tour of Farren Labs, I headed back to the hotel with a job offer that would be terribly difficult to refuse.
Chapter V – Detection Magic
; “Corin Cadence, cautious career criminal, cunningly contrives—”
I cut Sera off right there. “That’s more than enough alliteration. Get to the point.”
“You’re trying to come up with reasons why it’s safe to keep working there because you’re enjoying yourself. It’s a trap, Corin. Like, the world’s most obvious trap. They don’t want you there as a person. They want your Arbiter mark.”
I blinked. “Well, yeah, obviously. Come on, give me a little credit, here. Do you really think I’m that naïve?”
Sera just gave me a look.
I threw my hands up. “Fine, fine! I’ve made some questionable decisions where trust is involved. But most of them have worked out in the long run.”
“Orden and Jin both nearly killed us.”
“Eh, I don’t think Jin would have killed us. He probably only would have killed Vera.”
“That’s…not a lot better.” Sera sighed. “Look, I don’t want to be harsh, especially since you’re obviously enjoying yourself. Which is rare. Like, shockingly rare. But this whole thing is a huge warning sign, Corin. They’re incredibly sketchy. Like, they’re sketching several things at once, and you’re seeing them all like a final product.”
“I am at least…reasonably confident that isn’t what sketchy means.”
“My point is that if you agree to this now, you’re going to regret it later. Or, at very least, the rest of us will.”
I sighed. “I…need more time, though. I’ve asked some questions about Arbiters and stuff, but it’s been kind of hard to get much of anything about Warren Constantine specifically without sounding suspicious. Maybe if I just take a year—”
Sera reached into a bag, withdrew a file, and handed it to me.
I blinked. “This is…”
“Warren Constantine’s employment records for Farren Labs.”
I stared blankly at the file. “You…wait…how? Do they have no security at all? No, I’ve seen their security. What did you do, Sera?”