“Are you going to close the door?”
Jayna glanced into the kitchen where Topher stood rolling dough along the countertop. He had a loopy smile on his face, and a bit of flour dusted his chest and smudged his cheek.
“Sorry about that,” Jayna said, stepping inside and closing the door again. She paused long enough to place a protective seal once more against the door, using her power to solidify that seal. When she did, the energy that burst into the door filled it, anchoring it for a moment, then she turned away. “Is everything all right?”
Topher nodded. “Why?”
Jayna patted her pocket. “You sent a summons to us. You haven’t felt the need to do that before.”
“I wasn’t meaning to. I was trying to send a comment through. Obviously, that didn’t work.”
“A comment?”
“Eva said it was vibrating so hard it nearly ripped her dress off.” Topher smirked at the idea. “I don’t know if it would do that, but I’m hopeful that if I can push a little more intention into my enchantment, I should be able to pass on a comment to you.”
“I see,” Jayna said.
“I’m sorry if you thought I was in trouble.”
“I wasn’t really sure what to make of it,” Jayna said. “I just thought something had happened.”
Topher turned back to rolling out dough on the counter. “I wanted to see if the two of you would be here to eat.”
“That’s it?”
“I’ve told you before, Jayna. Neither of you eat very well. I’m trying to do my best to be useful to you.”
Jayna pulled the satchel off her shoulder and set it on the back of the chair. “You have been useful.”
He glanced over his shoulder at her. “I don’t always feel like it.”
It amused her to see a man as tall as Topher working in the kitchen, but it wasn’t the first time. He had an affinity for it, which she was thankful for. Not that she wouldn’t eat if not for him, but she did appreciate his concern for her, and even though Eva never said so, she knew she appreciated his concern for her, as well.
“Eva said your friend was under attack. Is he safe?”
“It seems the city has decided to take a different approach to sorcerers.”
“The dular and the sorcerers have not always gotten on all that well. Especially not in Nelar. I’ve heard stories about what it was like before. The Society tries to influence too much.”
“It’s that way everywhere,” Jayna muttered.
She took a seat at the table, glancing over to Eva, but it looked as if she were asleep. Hopefully not passed out. Jayna hadn’t been gone that long. Maybe long enough for Eva to finish a bottle of wine though. She had escorted Char home, gone to the market, and uncovered a fallen sorcerer. She supposed that would have been long enough.
“The Society likes to view themselves as the arbiters of magical authority.” Jayna twisted the dragon stone ring, debating how much to share with Topher. He didn’t need to know all the dirt with the Society. “Can you dig into what’s going on with the dular?”
Topher looked back at her. “I can try. Too many people are starting to know me though.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He shrugged. “Well, they are starting to know I work with you.”
“I didn’t realize that was a problem.”
“It’s not a problem. It’s just that . . .” He turned back and flipped the dough, slamming it down on the counter, and started rolling again. “They know that since I work with you, I’m not quite as safe as some of the other dular.”
“Safe?”
He shrugged. “There’s a certain culture in the city. If you’re one of the traditional Nelar dular, they treat you differently. I’m not, so I can get into some of the information on the periphery, but I can’t get into everything.” He shrugged again. “I can keep looking though. If I find anything, I’ll let you know.”
Jayna nodded. “I’m worried. There’s too much activity around, and I’m particularly concerned that if they decide to target sorcerers—”
“Do you really think they’ll start targeting sorcerers?”
“Well, they targeted Char today. And then . . .” There were times when she wasn’t exactly sure what to share with Topher, mostly because she didn’t know whether he was somebody whom she could completely trust. He wasn’t necessarily untrustworthy, it was just that he still suffered from the dwaring attack, and it had changed him in a way he hadn’t yet fully recovered from. “I found another sorcerer who had been attacked.”
Eva opened her eyes and looked over to her. “What do you mean, you found one?”
It figured that Eva would take that moment to wake up and listen. Jayna got to her feet. “After I brought Char back to the outpost. I felt something. Dark magic.”
Eva sat forward, turning her attention briefly to the fire. It might be Jayna’s imagination, but it looked as if the flames danced a little brighter and harder for a moment before fading back.
“You found another?”
“They wore a marker for the Order of Norej. And used dark magic. I could feel it.”
She could still feel it, somewhat. The ring constricted every so often, which suggested that whoever was active in the city, and whatever power was being used, was not done yet.
“There are too many questions Ceran hasn’t answered. I think it’s time we find our own answers,” Jayna said.
She headed over to Eva, taking a seat across from her. The fire was almost too hot. It blasted at Jayna intensely, causing sweat to erupt as soon as she sat down. How could Eva tolerate it?
“You mean Sarenoth,” Eva said carefully.
Jayna nodded. “I asked Char to look into it.”
Eva arched a brow. “Is that safe?”
“It might not be,” Jayna agreed. “I didn’t know what to do. He has access to records that we don’t. And . . .”
“And what?”
“And I tried to reach out to Ceran, but he’s not answering. Again.” Jayna shook her head, letting out a brief sigh. “I figured that if I could ask him, I might find out something more. We have to have answers. We keep dealing with this uncertainty, and unfortunately, the uncertainty is only going to end with one of us getting hurt.”
“By ‘one of us,’ you mean you.”
“Fine. I mean me. I don’t want to end up hurt just because I don’t understand everything that’s taking place.”
“Do you have any alternatives?”
“No. That’s just it. Short of digging back through what we’ve learned, I don’t know where to start.” She leaned back, closing her eyes. “We have names though. We didn’t have that before. We have Asymorn. Norej. Sarenoth. Knowing those names should give us a way of learning about them. Even rothand, which Char said was here before us. They’re all tied to Nelar, of all places.”
Eva gave no indication that she recognized the word.
It felt almost as if they were floundering. She’d been trying to patiently wait on Ceran, but that wasn’t Jayna’s strength. What they needed now was to dig in and get a hold of more information. Ceran had provided her with some, but not nearly enough for her to make any headway. There had to be a way to learn more while in Nelar.
“Why are you so concerned?” Topher asked, carrying over a sheet with biscuits on it.
He held it out, and Jayna took one carefully. They were warm, not too hot, and she bit into one, savoring the buttery flavor.
“Gods. I think you’re getting better each time you make something.”
Topher smiled. “See? I can be useful.”
“I never said you couldn’t.” She took another bite, chewing slowly. “As to your question, before Nelar, I never stayed in a place all that long. A couple of weeks at most. I would go somewhere, complete the task assigned to me—though never anything like what we’ve faced here—and move on.”
“What sort of things had you done before?” Topher asked, leaning against the wall and proppin
g one foot up. He held on to the tray, and Jayna worried he would drop it. She wanted another one of those biscuits.
Even Eva looked as if she were enjoying the food, chewing it slowly and carefully. A serene look had crossed her face.
“There was the first time that I was assigned to track down the oronok. They’re small creatures, feisty, and this one was apparently tainted with dark magic.” Jayna shook her head. “I think it was a test, more than anything else. As far as I know, Ceran might have tainted it himself.”
Eva glanced over. “In order for him to do that, he would need to have access to dark magic himself.”
“I’m not saying he has dark magic,” Jayna said. “Only that I suspect he was testing me. He needed to know whether I was capable of capturing it.”
“I’ve never heard of one of those things,” Topher said.
“They look like a small fox. All black fur. Almost inky black. You have to chase them at night, which of course is a challenge given how black their fur is. They have teeth that are nearly as long as their snout,” Jayna said, mimicking teeth protruding downward with two fingers. “If they bite, you might be dead before you know it.”
“He wouldn't have tested you with something poisonous, would he?”
Jayna shrugged. “This is Ceran. It wouldn’t surprise me.”
There was another possibility, and it was that he truly did want her to gather the oronok. It had been particularly difficult for her to capture. The Toral ring had given her power, and she’d been able to use that to create a containment, but she had to use sorcery to trap it.
“You were only assigned to track down creatures?” he asked.
“Creatures at first,” Jayna said. “Until we got here. Then it changed.” She took another bite, chewing slowly, savoring it. “Ceran tells me there has been a darkness in the world for centuries,” Jayna said. “And it is my responsibility to ensure the darkness is contained.”
“I thought sorcerers protected us from dark magic users.”
“That’s what they want everyone to believe. Yet I’ve seen that the sorcerers aren’t particularly well-equipped to deal with this kind of power.”
There were ways that sorcerers could deal with dark magic users, but not all within the Society particularly cared to do so. Many simply overlooked it.
“And if you can’t stop this magic?” Topher asked.
“That’s not an option,” Jayna said.
“Why doesn’t he get involved?”
Jayna shook her head. “He has me to help him.”
Eva started to laugh. “You’re asking the same questions I asked,” she said, glancing from Jayna to Topher. “And she still struggles to answer them, the same way she struggled answering me.”
“I’m not struggling to answer them,” she said. “It’s just that there aren’t any easy answers.”
“There’s an answer you haven’t even considered before.”
“And what is that?”
“He doesn’t want you to know the truth.”
She just shrugged. “I don’t think Ceran is keeping relevant things from me to get me hurt.”
From what he had said, the only things he had been keeping from her were things she wouldn’t be able to deal with—at least, not yet—and she believed it. She believed she simply wasn’t ready for certain information.
When she had faced Gabranth and the Celebrants of Asymorn, Jayna wasn’t entirely sure she was ready for them. She knew there was a dark magic in the city, but at the time, she had been working to try to remove other sorts of darkness, not that of sorcerers.
“Well, if there’s anything I can do . . .”
She looked over to Topher, and she nodded while smiling at him. “Thank you.” She looked around. “I think we’re going to need to start digging,” she said to Eva.
“Digging?”
“You have resources within the city. It’s time for us to take advantage of them. We need to figure out what those resources know about the Celebrants of Asymorn and the Order of Norej. Once we figure that out, then we can start digging into whatever we can find out about Sarenoth. Decide where we’ll start, and I’ll come with you.”
“You’ll be opening yourself up to a different type of question,” Eva said.
“What kind of question might that be?”
“The kind that asks why you’re looking into dark magic. You might be perceived as somebody interested in it. So far, you’ve done your best to avoid that perception.”
“That doesn’t mean I’ve avoided it altogether. Unfortunately, it seems that everything I’ve done, everything I’ve tried to do, keeps bringing me back around to needing to understand and uncover who these twelve followers of Sarenoth are, and who Sarenoth himself is.”
There was something else though: the troubling belief that maybe there was something more she still didn’t know, that there might be something else taking place, some other bit of magic beyond what she had uncovered so far.
She didn’t know how much of that Ceran understood. It might be that he truly didn’t know anything more than what he had already revealed.
“It might be dangerous,” Eva said.
“Have we done anything in the city that’s not?”
Eva leaned back, resting her head on the chair, and closing her eyes as she faced the fire. “Perhaps not.”
Jayna got to her feet, smiled at Topher, and headed back to her room. She stared at the broken remnants of the wall. It was held in place with surges of magic, but maybe it was time for her to figure out some way of holding it more securely, ensuring the wall itself never fell.
She grabbed one of the spellbooks Char had given her and started flipping through the pages, looking for something that could be useful to solidify the stone. All she needed was a way of holding it more securely. This was something she had put off, much like she had put off trying to better understand what she could learn about Norej and Asymorn. Both of them worried her, as did her concern that even if she were to find answers, they wouldn’t be useful to her without Ceran to help.
She found a spell that might work. She read through it, then read through it again, trying to keep it fixed in her mind. Sorcery was more complicated than the kind of magic she used through her Toral ring.
Still, as she settled in to begin, she couldn’t shake the memory of the attack on the street earlier.
Char had been targeted by dark magic, used to agitate the crowd. Now there was a dead dark sorcerer surrounded by smoke. Something was going on in the city, and this time it seemed to be more than just dark magic.
She traced a pattern out along the floor, repeating it the entire length of the wall. It was a very different pattern than what she had used in order to place the wall. When she was done, she had to grab a chair out of the kitchen and stand on it in order to place the same repeating pattern along the ceiling.
There might be something within this that she could use in other ways. When she was done, she stepped back and pushed power out through the patterns, linking them. One by one, she worked her way down the wall until the energy surged, solidifying.
With a flash of pale-white light, the stone smoothed over.
Jayna stepped back. She had never seen anything quite like that before.
It had worked.
And she had done it completely with sorcery, not by using power through the Toral ring.
Jayna sat down, grabbing the spellbook and resting it on her lap. Maybe she needed to spend more time working through the spells. Until she did, she was at a disadvantage in chasing after dark magic, especially where it involved powerful sorcerers.
But they would soon go out to search for Eva’s contacts. They had time—she hoped.
6
It was now late evening, and well past the time Jayna thought Eva should be up again for the day. Jayna had wanted to visit Eva’s contacts, but her friend had been sleeping for most of the afternoon, curled up in front of the fire, the heat blasting off of it. Every so often, E
va would stir, then head to the fire and add logs to it, getting it blazing even more brightly, before curling up once again in front of the hearth.
Jayna would have found herself smiling at that if it didn’t make the inside of the home so blasted hot. She hated the heat, though to be honest, the more Eva added logs to the fire, the more the humidity was pushed away. It tamped down most of it, so while the air was still unpleasant, it wasn’t quite as unpleasant as it would have been otherwise.
She sat at the table, flipping through spellbooks. Answers had to be there, though she hadn’t come across any yet. There was one spell she found intriguing, and it reminded her a little bit of the memory bowl she had purchased in the market. It was an unusual use of magic. Most of the time, the Sorcerers’ Society frowned upon magic that could influence memories, especially the kind that could be used to take memories away from somebody, but they had an entire section in this spellbook focused on that. Some of the spells were as simple as altering a recollection, while others were a matter of extracting memories.
Jayna sat in place, reading through it. The extraction of the memories was similar to what she had used the memory bowl for. If she could master how that spell worked, maybe she could hold on to it if she were to need it again. She didn’t want to have to use that kind of spell, and didn’t want to feel a need to take memories from someone, but at the same time, there was no denying the value in it. And if she could figure out how to reverse the spell, she might be able to help Eva.
Eva stirred again, and Jayna sighed.
She needed information, but she wasn’t about to go looking for it without Eva. She needed Eva’s presence with her to go to the kind of places she wanted to go and get the kind of information she thought she could acquire, mostly because Jayna hadn’t taken the time to foster any relationships with the owners of many of the antiquity shops throughout Nelar. Despite Eva’s grumpiness, she could be quite compelling with them.
Smoke and Memories (The Dark Sorcerer Book 3) Page 6