by James Hunter
Sam turned away, moving slowly yet purposefully so as not to draw unwanted notice, and backtracked away from the town square.
Once he was a few blocks away, he swapped the run-of-the-mill Apprentice’s cowl for his flamboyant cavalier hat. Now that Sam knew the history of the hat—that it was a link to a three-hundred-year-old class, long-since dead; he felt a renewed wave of pride to have it on top of his head no matter how goofy it looked.
It took half an hour and a round of polite inquiries, but eventually, Sam found himself in front of a brownstone-style bookstore called The Summoned Scroll. According to the handful of folks he’d chatted with, this was the single best—and most affordable—book and paper wholesaler in the entire northern block of the city, which locals referred to as the Upper North Fulham, or UpNoHam.
The inside of The Summoned Scroll was almost exactly what Sam had envisioned a magical bookstore to be. The place was rather dimly lit and smelled of polished wood, old leather, the acrid stink of bottled ink, and the dusky scent of reams upon reams of ancient paper. Massive bookcases took up most of the wall space, displaying a healthy number of leather-bound tomes.
After spending time in the Infinity Athenaeum, this place seemed positively… quaint. Leather club chairs dotted the otherwise open floor plan, all positioned in front of heavy desks which looked like workspaces for the studious. There were also several glass-fronted display cases holding particularly valuable books, pots of magical ink, and enchanted quills.
“Well, hello there, young man!” squawked a rather mousy woman tending to one of the display cases near the rear of the shop.
She was taller than Sam by a good five inches but almost skeletally gaunt with hawkish features and a rather pinched face. Her brown hair was pulled up into a tight knot at the back of her head, emphasizing her cheekbones, which looked sharp enough to cut glass. She wore a pair of thick-rimmed spectacles etched with odd runes directly across the lens. She folded her hands on top of the frosted glass case and smiled, which instantly transformed her face from severe to warm and open. “What can I help you with today?”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“The room is right this way, young master. Right this way,” the innkeeper hobbled in front of Sam, his knees oddly bowed as though he’d spent a lifetime on horseback. Which made sense, considering the name of the inn was The Rugged Saddleback. The boards creaked, squeaked, and moaned under the innkeeper’s heavy footfalls, and the weak, orange flames dancing at the end of tallow candles flickered as Sam slipped by.
The innkeeper seemed perfectly nice, but the Rugged Saddleback? Not so much. It was situated firmly in a sliver of the city known as ‘Cheapside’, and Sam was beginning to suspect the name was well earned. Unlike the other areas of Ardania he’d visited so far, Cheapside was run down. The inn was no different. Everything was serviceable—at least in the most technical sense of the word—but worn, dirty, and held together with some good ol’ fashion elbow grease. Sam had never actually seen elbow grease, but he was pretty sure the gobs of black … something … holding the staircase together was the real stuff.
But if there was one place he would likely be safe, it was Cheapside. The Mages were powerful, no doubt about that, but Cheapside was home to bad actors of every sort. After leaving The Summoned Scroll a full two hundred gold lighter and loaded down with enough quills, parchment, and ink to drown an elephant; Sam had learned that Cheapside belonged to Brotherhood of Upright Men—the Thieves’ Guild—just as surely as the College belonged to the Mages. The guard also avoided this area unless there were full-blown riots, and although the Mages could come here, in theory, they wouldn’t.
For one thing, no Mage would willingly debase themselves by putting one ‘Noble’ foot anywhere near what amounted to a slum. For another, the Upright Men were in something of a silent war with the Mages, which made it a perilous prospect for any spellcaster to be down this way. It was a perfect place for Sam to hide out; though he’d have to keep an eye out for cutthroats looking to slit his throat and rob him blind. Not necessarily in that order.
The innkeeper finally stopped in front of a nondescript door on the third floor, fishing a set of dangling keys from his belt. His hands trembled slightly as he slipped off a thick brass key and opened the lock on the door with a hefty *clank*. The innkeeper glanced over one hunched shoulder and offered Sam a hearty, lopsided smile filled with gaps from missing teeth. He pushed the door open, offered Sam the key, made sure to mention that the continental breakfast ran between six and nine, then bowed himself away after a brief round of ‘sleep tights’.
Sam’s temporary lodgings were just as run-down as everything else in the inn, but the space itself was significantly larger than his room at the Mage’s College had been. Honestly, it wasn’t in worse shape, which said everything that needed to be said about how the College treated their acolytes. There was a narrow twin bed with a horrifically lumpy looking mattress and a small end table with a chipped porcelain bowl and a pitcher of water. In the corner was a hulking wardrobe that appeared to have survived being dropped off a third-story balcony. Maybe several times.
“Yeah, about that.” Sam kicked off his boots. “Just one little thing.”
In response, Sam belly-flopped onto the bed, which was exactly as uncomfortable as it looked, his head finding the pillow in an instant. Despite both the bed—and Bill’s nattering voice—droning on, Sam was asleep in less than an eyeblink.
He startled awake sometime later, though just how long he’d slept was hard to say. When he glanced through the wooden slats covering the room’s only window, he saw the golden light of late afternoon washing over everything, making Cheapside look like some sort of idyllic tourist town, exactly the kind of place he would’ve expected to find in the European countryside. Looked like he was getting that vacation after all or at least bits and pieces of it. This vacation came with an added bonus—magic.
Sam grinned at the thought and pulled himself from the bed, feeling better than he had in ages.
Debuff removed: Sleep Deprivation III. Removed effect: -5 intelligence, -5 wisdom, -30% stamina.
Well… that explained things. He opened his status screen and decided to take a proper look around. Sam found and looked through an active effects tab and noted a ‘Stinky IV’ debuff that decreased his charisma by eight points and increased prices by four hundred percent. There was also a ‘Starving II’ and ‘Dehydrated III’ that reduced his Mana and stamina by twenty and thirty percent respectively. Then he noticed that he had fifteen unspent skill points.
“Should I spend them… or hold off until I can put them in something that matters?” Sam waffled back and forth, then decided that if he was going to wait this long, he could wait a little longer.
Name: Sam_K ‘Bunny Reaper’
Class: Bibliomantic Sorcerer
Profession: Unlocked
Level: 6 Exp: 20,523 Exp to next level: 477
Hit Points: 120/120
Mana: 373.5/373.5
Mana regen: 12.6/sec
Stamina: 135/135
Characteristic: Raw score (Modifier)
Strength: 20 (15+5 gear bonus) (1.15)
Dexterity: 26 (21+5 gear bonus) (1.21)
Constitution: 17 (1.17)
Intelligence: 36 (1.36)
Wisdom: 35 (1.35)
Charisma: 20 (15+5 gear bonus) (1.15)
Perception: 12 (1.12)
Luck: 12 (1.12)
Karmic Luck: -6
Okay, things weren’t perfect. He was a Rogue Mage on the run from the College and was about to betray all of humanity in favor of the Wolfmen. That was assuming he actually managed to stop Octavius in the first place, which was far from guaranteed. So… maybe everything wasn’t coming up Sam, but he’d managed to escape the College and wasn't currently wrapped in chains. He’d gotten away with Bill, he had a new bind spot away from the city, and most importantly, he was going to dive into his new class with reckless abandon and hopefully learn some slick new tricks.
Bill scoffed at him.
“What, you don’t sleep?” Sam suppressed an enormous yawn while clambering to his feet.
“Maybe a little breakfast first?” Sam sheepishly suppressed the rumble in his stomach.
Sam slipped back into the room twenty minutes later, his belly full and satisfied after hoovering up a bowl of very questionable ‘beef’ stew that came courtesy of the inn. ‘Continental breakfast’ indeed. At least he wasn't a fan of coffee, or he would have been even more disappointed.
“Like a cornfield, I’m all ears,” Sam agreed with a nod.
Bill was quiet for a long moment.
“I could dog-ear your pages if you really want some?”
“We’re going to go over why you had me almost entirely empty my bank account for this stuff, right?” Sam tried not to think about spending over ten thousand real-world dollars on something he couldn't see the benefit of.
He opened his Unending Flask and carefully pulled each item out of the spatial compartment, arranging them in orderly columns and rows so it would be easier to catalog what they had. First came the paper, great stacks of finely pressed papyrus, high-grade parchment, and even more expensive vellum. Five hundred sheets worth of writing material all told. Next, he added the book-binder tool kit he’d picked up. Out came a wood-handled awl with a razor-sharp tip, a wolf-bone fold creaser, several spools of waxed thread in various colors, several long, curved needles, and a glue brush with an accompanying glass bottle of epoxy.
Bill explained as Sam worked, arranging the piles and sorting the equipment.
With the parchment and bookbinding supplies all laid out and counted, Sam added quills of various sizes, types, and colors. Quills made of osprey feathers with fine metal nibs, others meticulously crafted from hawk feathers sporting bone tips. The feather variations were many—peacock, eagle, falcon, vulture—the nib types just as varied—iron, gold, silver, bronze, jade, bone… diamond.
To Sam, the differences seemed largely cosmetic, but Bill insisted that was only because he didn’t know what he was doing, because he didn’t yet have the true eye of a world-class Bibliomancer. According to Bill, the different varieties would allow Sam to write a wider variety of spells and make them far more powerful to boot.
Want to unleash a spell with decaying elements? Well, then you’ll want an onyx vulture quill with a specialized basilisk-bone nib. An air spell? Hawk feather with a crystal tip. It all made an odd sort of sense as Bill explained it, but Sam couldn’t even begin to figure out how anyone would possibly stumble across that kind of information without a guide.
After that came the inks, which were as unique, strange, and varied as the quills had been. There were several different types of black inks, which all looked the same at a glance. A little slip of paper affixed to each bottle with a bit of brown twine, however, painted quite a different picture for the inquisitive shopper. Yes, the ink base was the same, but each bottle was mixed with a variety of different alchemic ingredients—everything from wartsburrow and hawthorn bramble to plains hornet honey and rosemary.
Those alchemic mixtures primed the ink so that when it eventually became infused with Mana, it would naturally manifest various Mana aspects more easily. It was a devious little trick that would let a caster in the know supercharge spells; causing increased damage, increase ranged, or increased effect duration to name a few possible benefits.
Sam pulled out the books he’d grabbed from his raid on the library. Feeling a surge of satisfaction at his haul, he laid out Fundamentals of Core Cultivation; Brilliant Blossoms: A field guide to basic herbology; The Book of Lost Incantations, Rediscovered!; A Compendium of Magical Omens; Compact Fundamentals of Elemental Magic, Aeolus Edition; and the final volume, which he’d picked up on the Sage’s floor, Compendium on Protected and Dangerous Locations. With that done, he conjured the two bound tomes currently tucked away inside Bill’s Soul Space, placing them just apart from the other books.
Bill whistled as he surveyed the treasure trove of items.
Sam squinted, lips pursed, forehead creased. “Yeah, not entirely sure I do.”
Sam nodded. “Six books. Six spells. Following so far.”
“Where’s the but?” Sam narrowed his eyes. “From everything I’ve heard, most classes are pretty well balanced. That means if there’s that big of an advantage, there is usually some sort of significant drawback.”
beamed at him.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“Not to mention that some of the higher end paper costs nearly a gold a pop. Okay,” Sam sighed as he thought of his nearly drained bank account, “that all makes sense. I have a couple of questions; why was I able to cast Paper Shuriken and Papier-Mache Mage without first preparing books? What happens when the books run out of paper? Do I just shove a bunch of blank parchment in between the covers and keep on going?”