by Dima Zales
“Gala,” he said softly, “I already told you that I find you irresistible—”
She gave him a look that resembled a pout. “But you just resisted me.”
“I had to,” Blaise said patiently. “You’re so new to this world. I’m the first man—the first human—you’ve ever met in person. How can you possibly know how you feel about me?”
“Well, aren’t feelings exactly that? Feelings?” She frowned. “Are you saying that because I haven’t seen the world, my feelings are somehow less real?”
“No, of course not.” Blaise felt like he was digging himself a deeper hole. “I’m not saying that what you’re feeling right now isn’t real. It’s just that it might change in the very near future, as you go out there and see more of the world . . . meet more men.” As he added that last tidbit, he could feel a hot flare of jealousy at the idea, and he squashed it with effort, determined to be noble about this.
Gala’s eyes narrowed. “All right. If that’s your concern, that’s fine. I’ll go out there tomorrow, and I’ll meet other men. And then I’m going to come back and kiss you as much as I want.”
Blaise’s pulse leapt. “Why don’t I take you to the village right now then?” he said, only half-jokingly.
Her eyes lit up, and she practically jumped with eagerness. “Yes, let’s go!”
Chapter 13: Augusta
Below, Augusta could see the peasants launching their attack.
Barson and his soldiers were expecting to be teleported, but when it didn’t happen, they began fighting with ferocious determination. Soon they were surrounded by corpses. Augusta’s lover seemed particularly inhuman in his battle frenzy. Realizing his strategic value, the rebels came at him, one after another, and he dispatched them all with the brutal swings of his sword.
Seeing that the guards were holding their own, Augusta tried to concentrate. She couldn’t fly down to retrieve her spell card—not with a bloody battle raging below—so she had to write a new one.
Getting her thoughts together, she took out a blank card and the remaining parts of the spell. All she had to do now was re-create from memory the complicated bit of sorcery code she’d written earlier. Luckily, Augusta’s memory was excellent, and it took her only a few minutes to recall what she’d done before.
When the spell was finished, she loaded the cards into the Stone and peered below, holding her breath.
A minute later, Barson and his soldiers disappeared from the battleground, leaving behind dozens of dead bodies and baffled rebels.
* * *
“I am so sorry,” she said when she rendezvoused with Barson and his men back on the hill.
Luckily, no one was hurt; if anything, the fighting seemed to have lifted everyone’s spirits. The soldiers were laughing and slapping each other on the back, like they had just come back from a tournament instead of a bloody battle.
“We held our ground,” Barson told her triumphantly, snatching her up in his strong arms and twirling her around.
Laughing and gasping, Augusta made him put her down. “You’re lucky I was able to replace that card so quickly,” she told him. “If I’d lost some other card, it would’ve taken me more effort to replace it, and you’d have been fighting longer.”
“Perhaps there is something you can do to make up for that blunder,” Barson suggested, looking down at her with a darkly excited smile.
“What?” Augusta asked warily.
“The rebels will be here soon,” he said, his eyes gleaming. “Do you think you could thin their numbers a little?”
Augusta swallowed. “You want me to do a direct spell against them?”
“Is that against the Council rules?”
It wasn’t, exactly, but it was highly frowned upon. In general, the Council preferred to limit displays of magic around the commoners. It was considered poor taste for sorcerers to show their abilities so openly—and it could be potentially dangerous, if it incentivized the peasants to try to learn magic on their own. Offensive spells were particularly discouraged; using sorcery against someone with no aptitude for magic was the equivalent of butchering a chicken with a sword.
“Well, it’s not strictly speaking against the law,” Augusta said slowly, “but it shouldn’t be obvious that I’m doing this.”
Barson appeared to consider the problem for a moment. “What if it looked like natural causes?” he suggested.
“That might work.” Augusta thought about a few spells she could quickly pull together. She hadn’t expected to do anything like this, but she did have the right components for these spells. She’d brought them for different purposes, but they would help her now too.
Digging in her bag, she pulled out a few cards and rapidly wrote some new lines of code. When she was finished, she told Barson to have his men sit or lie on the ground for a few minutes. “It might get a bit . . . shaky here,” she explained.
The peasants were still a distance away when she began feeding the cards into her Interpreter Stone.
For a moment, all was quiet. Augusta held her breath, waiting to see if her spell worked. She’d combined a simple force attack of the kind that might have blown up a house with a clever teleporting idea. Instead of hitting the peasants directly, the spell would be teleported into the ground under the feet of their attacking army. There, beneath the ground, the force would break and shatter rocks, creating the chain reaction she needed—or so Augusta hoped.
For a few nerve-wracking seconds, it seemed like nothing was happening. And then she heard it: a deep, sonorous boom, followed by a powerful vibration under her feet. The earth shook so violently that Augusta had to sit or be knocked to the ground herself. In the distance, she could hear the screams of the peasants as the ground split open under their feet, a deep gash appearing right in the middle of their army. Dozens of men tumbled into the opening, falling to their deaths with frightened yells.
Step one of the plan was complete.
Augusta loaded her next spell. It was one of the deadliest spells she knew—a spell that sought pulsating tissue and applied a powerful electric current to it. It was meant to stop a heart—or multiple hearts, given the width of the radius Augusta had coded.
The spell blasted out, and Augusta could see the peasants who were still on their feet falling, clutching their chests. With her enhanced vision, she could see the looks of shock and pain on their faces, and she swallowed hard, trying to keep down the bile in her stomach. She had never done this before, had never killed so many using sorcery, and she couldn’t help her instinctive reaction.
By the time the spell had run its course, the road and the grassy fields nearby were littered with bodies. Less than half of the original peasant army was left alive.
Still feeling sick, Augusta stared at the results of her work. Now they would run, she thought, desperately wanting this battle to be over.
But to her shock, instead of turning back, the survivors rushed toward the hill, clutching their remaining weapons. They were fearless—or, more likely, desperate, she realized. These men had known from the beginning that their mission was dangerous, but they’d chosen to proceed anyway. She couldn’t help but admire that kind of determination, even though it scared her to death. She imagined the rebels behind the Sorcery Revolution—the ones who had overthrown the old nobility so brutally—had been just as determined in their own way.
All around her, Barson’s soldiers prepared to meet the onslaught, assuming their places and drawing their arrows.
As the peasants got closer to the hill, a hail of arrows rained down, piercing their unshielded bodies. The soldiers hit their targets with the same terrifying precision that Augusta had seen during practice. Every peasant who got within their arrows’ range was dead within seconds. Yet the rebels persisted, continuing on, pushing past their fallen comrades. Lacking any kind of structure or organization, they simply kept going, their faces twisted with bitter rage and their eyes shining with hatred. The futility of all the deaths was overwhelming
for Augusta. By the time Barson’s men ran out of arrows, less than a third of the original aggressors remained.
Tossing aside their useless bows, the guards, as one, unsheathed their swords. And then they waited, their expressions hard and impassive.
When the first wave of attackers reached the hill, they were dispatched within seconds, the soldiers’ sorcery-enhanced weapons sharper and deadlier than anything the peasants had ever seen before. Standing off to the side, Augusta watched as waves of attackers came and fell all around the hill.
Her lover was death incarnate, as unstoppable as a force of nature. Half the time, he would singlehandedly tackle the waves of rebels, easily taking on twenty or thirty men. The other soldiers were almost as brutal, and Augusta could see the peasants breaking up into smaller and smaller groups, their ranks diminishing with every minute that passed.
Within an hour, the battle was nearing its morbid conclusion. Staring at the bloody remnants on the field, Augusta knew it was a battle she would never forget.
No, she corrected herself. It was not a battle—it was a slaughter.
Chapter 14: Gala
“This is spectacular,” Gala told Blaise, looking down at the city below. They were sitting on his chaise, a magical object that she found quite impressive. Light blue in color, it reminded Gala of a narrow, elongated sofa—except that it was made of a strange diamond-like material that looked hard, but was actually quite soft and pleasant to the touch. Blaise was navigating it using verbal spells.
Gala especially liked the fact that she could sit so close to Blaise. She enjoyed his nearness; it made her recall the warm sensations she’d experienced when she’d kissed him earlier. Thinking about that kiss, she tore her eyes away from the view below and glanced at Blaise, studying his strong profile.
It bothered her that he doubted her feelings. She obviously lacked real-world experience, but she’d read enough to understand the mechanics of attraction—and what it meant, to feel like that about someone. She was sure that meeting other people wouldn’t make a difference in how she regarded Blaise. This trip to the village would serve multiple purposes, she thought, turning her attention back to the city below. It would let her see the world, and it would also reassure Blaise that she knew her own mind. She didn’t want to seem ignorant or naive to her creator.
“This is the Town Square,” Blaise said, interrupting her musings. He was pointing at a large open area below. “You can see all the merchant stalls surrounding it. And you see that water fountain in the center?”
“Yes,” Gala said, her excitement increasing. She liked learning, and it was great to see these things with her own eyes, rather than through a Life Capture or the pages of a book.
“Everybody who visits Turingrad comes to this fountain to throw a coin in the water,” Blaise said. “Rich or poor, commoner or sorcerer—they all come here to make a wish.”
“Why? Is that a form of sorcery?”
“No.” Blaise chuckled. “Just an old custom. It was in place long before Lenard the Great and the discovery of the Spell Realm. A superstition, if you will.”
“I see,” Gala said, though the concept confused her a little. Why would humans throw their coins into the fountain like that? If the fountain had nothing to do with sorcery, then it obviously couldn’t grant wishes.
“And that’s the Tower of Sorcery over there,” Blaise said, pointing at an imposing structure sitting on top of a large hill. “That’s where the most powerful sorcerers live and work. The Council holds meetings there as well, and the first few floors are occupied by the Academy of Sorcery, a learning institution for the young. The Sorcerer Guard is also stationed there.”
Gala nodded, studying the Tower with curiosity. It was a large, stately castle, made even more impressive by its location on the mountain. Whoever had built it was clearly making a statement. The building practically screamed ‘power.’
Looking at it, Gala realized that something about the mountain bothered her. The shape of it, the steep cliff at one end—it was just too different from the surrounding flat landscape. “Is the mountain real?” she asked Blaise, turning her head to look at him.
“No.” He gave her a smile. “It was built by the first sorcerer families over two hundred years ago. They wanted the Tower to be unassailable, so they did a spell to make the earth rise up, creating this hill. The building itself is fortified with all manner of sorcery as well.”
“Why did they do this? Was it because they were afraid of the common people?”
“Yes,” Blaise said. “And they still are. It’s unfortunate, but the memory of the Sorcery Revolution is still fresh in most people’s minds.”
Gala nodded again, remembering what she’d read in one of Blaise’s books. Two hundred and fifty years ago, the entire fabric of Koldun society had been ripped apart by a bloody revolution. The old nobility had gotten fat and lazy, disconnected from the brewing discontent of their subjects. The king had been among the worst of the offenders, completely oblivious to the changes taking place as a result of the Enlightenment and one man’s discovery of something called the Spell Realm.
Lenard—or Lenard the Great, as he would later become known—had been a brilliant inventor who, among his other achievements, managed to tap into a strange place that had the power to alter reality in a way that was uncannily similar to fairy-tale magic. It wasn’t a fairy tale, of course, and what was known in the modern era as magic was nothing more than complex and still little-understood interactions between the Spell Realm and the Physical Realm. But his discovery changed everything, resulting in the rise of a new elite: the sorcerers.
It started off as harmless little spells—oral incantations in a complex, arcane language that only the brightest, most mathematically inclined individuals could master. Some of the first sorcerers were from the noble class, but many were not. Anyone, regardless of their lineage, could tap into the Spell Realm, and Lenard encouraged everyone to learn mathematics and the language of magic, to understand the laws of nature. He even went so far as to open a school, a place that later became known as the Academy of Sorcery, where many of the subsequent magical and scientific discoveries took place.
Within a decade, sorcery and knowledge brought about by the Enlightenment began to permeate every aspect of life on Koldun. The sorcerers discovered a way to sustain themselves without food, to move from place to place in a blink of an eye via teleportation, and even to do battle using spells. Before long, the centuries-old feudal system of hereditary nobility began to seem outdated to those who could change the fabric of reality with a few carefully chosen sentences. Notions of fairness and progress, of basic human rights and merit-based societal standing, spread like wildfire, catching the nobles completely off-guard.
By the time the king understood the threat posed by the new sorcerer class, it was too late. The peasants, realizing that their lords were no longer as all-powerful as they once were, grew more demanding, and uprisings erupted all over Koldun as commoners sought to better their quality of life. Most of the sorcerers—though not all—supported the peasants, and those of the lower class who lacked the aptitude for magic banded behind them, seeking the sorcerers’ protection against the nobles who still had the king’s army on their side.
The end result was a revolution—a bloody civil conflict lasting six years. As it progressed, each side grew more brutal and vengeful, and the atrocities perpetuated by the peasants against their former masters ended up being as horrifying as what the barbarians did in the Age of Darkness. It wasn’t until almost every noble family was slaughtered and the king lost his head that the revolution came to an end, leaving the survivors to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives.
It was no wonder that the sorcerers feared the peasants, Gala thought, staring at the Tower. After all, sorcerers were now the new ruling class.
* * *
After several hours of flying, they finally approached their destination. Gala recognized the field below from one of the
Life Captures she’d consumed earlier; it was even more beautiful from above. The spring work in her vision must’ve been completed, and tall stalks of wheat populated the landscape.
Off to the side was a cluster of buildings that Gala guessed to be the village. Unlike the rich, elaborate-looking structures in Turingrad, the houses here were much smaller. Simpler, Gala thought. She remembered reading that many peasant homes were made of clay, and it appeared to be the case here as well.
There was a little clearing between two of the bigger houses, and that was where they landed.
As soon as their chaise touched the ground, the door to one of these houses opened, and two older women came out.
Gala stared at them, intrigued. She’d read about the physical changes that occur in humans throughout their lives, and she wondered about these women’s ages. To her, they appeared to be similar to each other, with their grey hair and brown eyes, although Gala found one of them to be more pleasant-looking than the other.
Seeing Blaise, they smiled widely and rushed toward the chaise.
“Blaise, my child, how are you?” the prettier one of the two exclaimed.
“And who is this beautiful girl with you?” the other woman jumped in.
Before Blaise had a chance to answer and Gala could fully register the fact that she had just been called ‘beautiful,’ the woman who spoke first turned toward Gala and announced, “I am Maya. Who might you be, my child?”
“And I am Esther,” said the other one without giving Gala a chance to reply. Her face was creased with a smile that Gala liked very much. In general, despite the woman’s more homely appearance, Gala decided that something about her was quite appealing. Both women had a warmth to them that Gala found pleasant.