He looked up from time to time, sniffing as if breathing in some mysterious aroma in the air before continuing forward. He did that several times until Imogen finally questioned him on it.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“I feel something in the distance,” he said. “Not your brother, but… something.”
She stepped carefully, moving in one of her patterns as she felt the energy in the air. She could feel how the power continued to build around her, as though there was something more she could hold on to.
“What do you detect, then?”
“I detect the ground and the wind and the heat in the air.”
She could feel much of what he was referring to, but she couldn’t help but be curious about more than just that. Ever since encountering Benji, she had been left with questions. He was a Porapeth, after all, and he had impossible magic.
“The Porapeth aren’t the only people with magic the Leier don’t hunt,” she said.
Benji nodded. “That is as it should be. The Porapeth are quite impressive.”
“And modest, aren’t you?”
“Why must I be modest?” he said with a chuckle. “I share the truth. Isn’t that what you want out of me?”
Imogen wasn’t exactly sure what she wanted from him. Answers, maybe. The Porapeth were supposedly able to see into the future and could use that knowledge to guide her people. Benji certainly had his quirks, but did he actually have the ability to see into the future? Or were those stories little more than myth?
“How does your magic work?” she asked.
“How does yours work?”
“I don’t—”
Imogen cut herself off before she said that she didn’t have magic. She certainly wasn’t sure if she did or not, but though she believed she did not, she had become increasingly certain that whatever she did was some form of magic. Not sorcery, but something similar to how enchanters weren’t sorcerers but still possessed a type of magic.
The fog in the distance shifted and turned, almost as if it were alive and coming toward her.
“Something is moving toward us,” she said, motioning into the distance.
Benji crouched down, and this time, he placed both hands on the ground. He did so tentatively, as if afraid of touching the ground. “I do not feel anything.”
Imogen’s arms tingled, the hairs standing on end. There was power here, and she had no idea where it was or what it was, only that she could feel it. It was nearly overwhelming.
“I feel something,” she said.
He watched her. “Then we must be careful.”
“You trust me?”
“You are a First of the Blade. Should I not trust you?”
“It’s not that, it’s just…”
He smiled. “You are a First, and you have trained in the sacred patterns of your people.”
Somehow, that mattered more to him than she would’ve expected. She started to flow with one of the patterns, gliding with it. And as she did, she could feel the energy around her rising and coalescing, but there was also something more. Some aspect of power that followed the sacred pattern.
The shadows shifted again. It was the second time they did, and this time, she was certain she was not imagining things.
“What other creatures are here?” she asked, looking over to Benji briefly.
“There are many creatures in the Shadows of the Dead,” he said.
“What are they? I’ve never seen anything quite like the adlet, or the manalak, or—”
“They are creatures that have embraced the power available to them.”
“Dark power?” she asked. When he nodded, Imogen sighed. “What will it take to destroy them?”
“None can say with any certainty,” Benji said.
“What about you? What can you say with certainty?”
He glanced over and shrugged. “That is not my gift.”
“You are a Porapeth.”
“Do you even know what that means?”
“Not really,” she said, frowning. “But I know what I’ve seen.”
Imogen moved carefully and kept her voice low as she glided across the ground. She stayed focused in her patterns, knowing she would need the magic she might be able to summon if she were to cross this plain and find her brother.
“And what, exactly, do you think you have seen?” Benji said.
Imogen furrowed her brow in concentration. “I don’t know. I have seen you talking to the wind. Talking to the grasses. Talking to the ground.”
“You have.”
“And I have seen you drawing on power. I’m just curious how,” she said.
Benji smiled at her. “Can I tell you how to breathe?”
“You could explain the concept,” she said, realizing he was trying to get out of sharing with her what she wanted to know.
He chuckled. “Perhaps I could. But as you have struggled to understand yourself, what makes you think you can understand me?”
Imogen paused on one of the drier bits of land. It dipped down again, traveling through grasses submerged in water, but Benji stood atop a narrow finger of land, and she knew she could follow him. Strangely, she could feel a crackle of energy along her skin. Sorcery, she suspected. Every so often, she unsheathed her sword, testing whether there were any spells she needed to disrupt, but she detected nothing.
Still, she knew what was going on here. She could feel it.
Power. That was what this was about.
“If these creatures were once tied to sorcery, then could they be sorcerers themselves?” she asked, ignoring his question.
“It is possible,” he said. “None can say.”
“Not even Benji the Elder.”
He smirked. “Even Benji the Elder can’t say with any certainty. As much as I might like to know what is out there, from what I have seen, I cannot guarantee anything.”
They continued moving, and Imogen stayed flowing through three primary patterns: Snow Falling, Rain Down the Window, and Petals on the Wind. It seemed to her that Petals on the Wind was the most useful of the patterns, only because it seemed to bridge most of the others and bind them together. The technique gave her the ability to find something more within it, as if she could find an answer there, but so far, she had not yet seen that answer.
She looked over to Benji. “I’m afraid, if that’s what you want me to acknowledge.”
“You’re afraid of what?”
“Ever since I started to question the nature of the sacred patterns, I’ve been nervous.”
Benji laughed. “You can say you’ve been afraid. Your people fear what they shouldn’t, and you were taught to fear what you could be.”
“I wish I didn’t. I also wonder…” She trailed off, ignoring Benji’s pointed look in her direction.
She wasn’t about to explain to him how she had been sent away from the sacred temple for failing to perfect any of the patterns that Master Liu tried to teach her. She didn’t need to explain that to him. That she had no notches on her blade was all the answer he needed, especially as he seemed to understand all about her people. When the silence stretched between them, she knew he was waiting for her to go on.
“I wonder if the quest I was sent on is a different one than what I undertook.”
Benji let out a small chuckle. “An interesting observation. One thing I have seen during my time in this world is that sometimes the path you are on is not the one you think is before you. It’s only until you have made the journey that you can look back and see where you’ve gone, and only then can you evaluate where you need to go.”
He sounded like Master Liu.
“I’ve started to wonder why my people fear magic,” Imogen said.
“Because they don’t understand it,” he replied. “And because they refuse to attempt it. They could try, and think about what they might be able to find. Your people must have some potential. How could they not? All people have some potential.” He laughed, and the sound did
n’t pass far into the air around them, as if the fog muted it. “Magic is a part of the world. Perhaps the only necessary part of the world. All people have a way of reaching it, but they have to be willing to do so. Your people have chosen to ignore it. They have chosen to fear it. Both because they want to defend their borders from the Koral, and because they convince themselves that it is necessary.”
“And if they knew I could use magic…”
It was hard for her to acknowledge it, hard for her to even get the words out, but that was what it came down to. If she could use magic, what did it mean for her?
But then, if she could use magic, it meant that others learning the sacred patterns could do so as well. And none of her people would ever question Master Liu about that.
Maybe that was the key.
“I see that you are starting to ask a different question,” Benji said.
“Did Master Liu know the truth about the sacred patterns?”
“What do you think?”
“I suppose I have a hard time thinking he would not have known.”
Which meant that her sacred patterns and everything she’d learned about them were all about trying to understand how to reach for that magic and how to use it. And at the time, she had been unwilling to understand.
“I have found that those who access magic understand what it is.” Benji glanced over to her, a knowing look on his face. “Well, perhaps not all. Your people, even those who claim to fear magic, use a form of it to disrupt sorcery.” He let out a laugh and shook his head. “And you must decide what it means for you, much like your people must decide what it means for them. In your travels, I suspect you saw much that you had not expected to see before.”
She nodded slowly. “More than I expected. And I met people who taught me things that I wouldn’t have learned in my homeland.”
“Not such a bad quest to take, then.”
She looked over, and she couldn’t help but smile at him. “We were trained to handle sorcery. Darkness.”
He raised a hand. “I’ve lived long enough to know that your people learned how to manage a specific type of darkness, but then you took a detour.”
She had been moving in some of the sacred patterns while walking alongside him, trying to decide what more she could and should say. There was a difference to the pattern this time. While talking to Benji, she had found herself moving in the strange way she had seen from him, how he twisted and turned across the landscape.
Her body froze, only her arms moving in the Snow Falling pattern, nothing more than that. As she did, she could feel the buildup of energy around her, and she could feel that there was still something taking place, though she did not know what it was. Perhaps it was little more than the pattern, or perhaps it was something within her, some aspect of power she possessed. Either way, Imogen could feel that energy continuing to intensify, and something about it struggled within her.
“Is this why you refuse to go back?” Benji asked.
Imogen closed her eyes. “It’s not so much that I refuse to return. It’s more about questioning what I need to do when I do return.”
“The journey is never complete,” he said. There was a knowing look in his eyes, and for a moment, the skin on Imogen’s arms tightened with tension even more. Then it eased. “And when we reach the end of this journey, what will you do?”
Imogen took a deep breath, and she shook her head. “I will have to find a new bond.”
“I hope for your sake that you do.”
She watched him with a frown. “You’re different than you were when we first met.”
“Am I?”
“You seem like it. You’re not swearing as much.”
“If I knew you enjoyed my swearing, I would keep up with it, but I do recall you making a comment about how I was doing it too much.”
Imogen shrugged. “It was more for my brother than for me.”
“Well, since he’s not here, then I’ll talk about that little shit.”
She chuckled. Even though Benji was a Porapeth and impossibly powerful, she couldn’t help feeling entertained by him. She wasn’t sure if she was supposed to feel that way about a Porapeth, but there was something simply amusing about him.
“I feel it coming, but I don’t know what it is,” she said.
“As do I, and I do not know either.”
“Do you think it is one of these creatures?”
“Maybe. There are plenty of different bastards out here that might come at us. You’ll have to be ready for anything. Besides, we have to hurry through here before your brother gets stuck in some muck, fed on by one of these trees, or drawn into whatever Dheleus thinks to do in service of his master.”
The idea that this was what it was all about seemed almost impossible to her.
“How can that even be real?” she asked, thinking of Sarenoth.
Benji frowned at her. “How can your power be real? How can mine? The question isn’t how it can be real. The question is how powerful it would be—and I can assure you that the magic that exists around us is incredibly powerful. But it pales in comparison to what the Sul’toral seek to unleash upon the world.”
Imogen nodded and fell silent. The farther they went, the more she felt that tension on her. For a moment, she thought it might be Benji using his magic on her, but she realized that wasn’t what it was. That meant it was either these creatures, sorcery, or the land itself. Whatever it was, it was powerful.
But why should she feel something against her so strongly?
And as she watched, she waited, and began to realize what it was. It wasn’t the power of a creature, not at all like what she had detected before. This was something else. Something distinct. Something dark.
“I feel a force pushing against my patterns. Sorcery.”
She hesitated, looking off into the distance, and something shifted. Shimmering in the air, it began to separate from the shadows. A figure strode toward them, and power began to build and swirl around them. Imogen prepared herself by focusing on the patterns, though as that power and energy continued to come toward her, she realized she could not prepare for it.
It was too powerful.
“That is not just a sorcerer,” Benji said. “That is a Toral.”
Chapter Twenty
The Toral were the servants of a Sul’toral, so the fact that a Toral was here told her everything she needed to know about what was going on: they were close to the Sul’toral.
She had faced sorcerers. Plenty of them, even recently. Her people trained to fight sorcerers, and she took pride in that ability—pride in her own ability. She believed she could handle herself against any type of sorcery. But perhaps that was misplaced arrogance.
Imogen had encountered Toral before, which had been more than she could handle at the time. She hadn’t given much thought to how Timo had cut down the Toral outside Yoran, but he had done it alone. She had only encountered this kind of power once—and hadn’t been the one fighting it. Could she withstand it?
Benji watched her, and then he leaned forward, tapping his hand on the ground while whispering something to the grasses growing around them.
“Are you going to help?” she said.
He looked up and shook his head, his eyes flashing at her. “This is not for me to help with. You are a First of the Blade.”
It sounded like a taunt when he said her title, and the more often he did, the more she began to think that he intended it that way, for whatever reason.
“You could use your magic to make the swamp easier to fight in,” she pointed out.
“My magic?” He straightened and traced his fingers through the air, as if swirling them toward some invisible creature. For a moment, there came a stir of the wind. A gentle breeze began to gust, but then it faded into nothingness. “My magic might be able to help with the swamp, but it’s not going to be able to help you with this sorcerer.”
“Toral,” she reminded him.
“Right,” he said, c
huckling. His voice was low and strange as he did. “But I have faith, First.”
The Toral came toward her, and Imogen stayed ready. She held her sword loosely and cleared her mind, trying to focus on the patterns that might be beneficial. This was no monster. Not like the adlet or manalak. This was sorcery—something she could deal with.
She strode forward, glancing over to Benji but ignoring what he was doing. The Toral stood about a dozen paces across from her. The ground swirled with the dark fog, the late-night hour making it difficult for her to see much of anything. There was a hint of a smile on the Toral’s face.
Imogen held their gaze. “You will—”
The Toral didn’t give her a chance to finish. With a quick swirl of movement from their hands, a surge of invisible power exploded. Something within the air crackled, and Imogen tried to be ready. She felt energy circle around her, something pressing inward on her, forcing her back. Benji remained crouched, hands running across the grasses, his mouth working quickly as he murmured.
A flurry of shadowy movement began to wrap outward from the Toral, and creatures began to appear. There were dozens of them—enchantments, she was sure of it. Stone and wood and earth had been given the power of a sorcerer, infused in such a way to animate each one and turn it into a weapon. Many of these enchantments were strangely shaped, though they all resembled real creatures. At least, that had been her experience when facing these kinds of enchantment before.
The Toral would use them against her, try to restrict her from moving. Imogen stayed focused on her traditional patterns, darting through them quickly and cutting through the magic that threatened to hold her. As she fought, she started to question whether this was only a Toral. Their skill seemed like more than what a simple Toral would be capable of, not that she thought they were simple with anything, only that this was considerable magic. Either there were many of them, or this was some part of the Sul’toral’s defenses.
Imogen focused, then began flowing forward. It was a matter of staying within her patterns. When her blade carved through the nearest of the creatures—a dog that looked to be made of mud and grass—a strange squeal echoed, and then the enchantment exploded in a burst of wet earth.
Unbonded (First of the Blade Book 1) Page 20