Three Acts of Penance [01] Attrition: The First Act of Penance

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Three Acts of Penance [01] Attrition: The First Act of Penance Page 42

by S. G. Night


  There was the light-Magick that Oron had shown him before, “the Spark”, which created a mobile orb of iridescent light.

  There was “the ‘Flage”, a telephotonic spell that would force light to bend around him, rendering him camouflaged (he noted the rather uncreative origin of the name). While useful, it took a massive amount of concentration to maintain. Not to mention that it left the space his body occupied warped and distorted, as though the air will filled with imperfect glass — not exactly true invisibility.

  There was the power called “the Freeze”, which could prevent a galdurist from using magic entirely. This could only be broken by another galdurist “Unfreezing” with a certain electric Magick — or, in the case of a High-Mage, by coming into contact with a sufficient amount of energy that matched their corobna dosdom. A useful hex for capturing an enemy gifted with magic.

  Oron even showed him “Slipping”, a Magick related to chaotic planar energies. With it, a galdurist could open a small hole in the fabric of the world, and put an object through it. The object would then reemerge at a distant location as the galdurist desired. Planar magic was dangerous and tricky, though, so Oron encouraged him to leave Slipping to Rachel Vaveran when he reentered the outside world.

  And so much more. Magicks like “the Muffle”, “the Shroud”, “the Bind”, “the Star Flare”, and “the Snuff”. Powers like telepathy and enchantment. And, of course, more glamoury, which Oron taught Racath to use, and continued to use on him regularly.

  Later on in the pit, Racath would have to learn to use all those Magicks. It was difficult work. Learning High-Magicks (any kind of magic, really), particularly at the relatively old age of nineteen, is a fairly awkward process.

  Think of it like being born with a gimpy third arm that you never knew how to move. And then, one day, someone tries to teach you how to use it.

  This was only made worse by the fact that Majiski anatomy — specifically, the markara — makes High-Magicks unbelievably slippery. But Oron would keep Racath working on one Magick or another until he got the hang of it, even if it took all morning. Or all week.

  ——

  “God dammit,” Racath hissed on one particularly failure-ridden occasion in the pit.

  “Try not to think too hard about it,” Oron coached. “Think about the illusion itself, not how you’re going to create it. Otherwise you’ll end up fixated on every particle of light and air that you’re manipulating, and you’ll lose focus on the goal.”

  “I’m trying,” Racath growled. His brow itched with the sweat of his concentration, which only distracted him more. “But like you said, Majiski aren’t exactly cut out for this kind of magic.”

  “I did say that,” Oron conceded. “But you’ve demonstrated that you’re more than capable of overcoming that minor obstacle. So keep at it. Remember, illusions are merely light and space, manipulated into patterns that form a false appearance or image.”

  “Yes, I know how illusions work,” Racath said, struggling to keep his frustration from snapping. “But that doesn’t make it any easier.”

  “Try casting it again.”

  Biting his tongue, Racath looked back to the empty space in front of him. He held out his hand. Focused. Gathered his energy…

  The air rippled like a heat wave. Spots of color and texture began to resolve like bruises, forming a shape. Racath pushed….

  …And lost it. The half-formed illusion flickered and melted away into the air.

  “God…Fauling…damn!” Racath’s skin burned and itched with aggravation, like ants crawling all over him. His pulse pounded noisily in his ears. “Fauling damn! I had it!”

  “Focus on creating the shape of the illusion for now,” Oron suggested. “Just the appearance. You can manipulate the air to add solidity later. Remember the steps—”

  “Empty the mind, possess the target space with the mind, channel the energy into the space while holding a mental image of the desired illusion,” Racath recited bitterly. “Yeah, I’ve got that part. I just keep slipping whenever I try and call up the fauling mental image.”

  “You’re losing your possession of the target space,” Oron observed. “You need to move through the steps as quickly as possible, so that you don’t lose your hold on it before you call up the mental image. Try it again.”

  Racath bristled. He opened his mouth to snap at Oron again, to defy him, to give up. But he remembered Nelle’s words that day she had chastised him for behaving like a child. He remembered his promises. He clamped his mouth shut again and swallowed hard.

  With effort, he turned back to face the empty pit. The awaiting space glared back at him, as though issuing a challenge.

  Taking a deep, calming breath, Racath cleared his mind. He forgot the itching distraction of his clothes, clinging uncomfortably to his body, and the annoying twitch of a tendon in his neck. He exhaled, breathing all the agitation out.

  He inhaled one more time…then, in a rush, extended his hand, reached out with his mind, took hold of the space before him, slapped an image onto his mind’s eye, and shunted the energy outward.

  The air in front of him shimmered, wavered…then resolved into a humanoid shape. The details of the illusion came into crisp focus: a soft face, bright eyes, and golden hair. A perfectly-formed, illusionary Nelle stood there, smiling back at him.

  “Someone on your mind, Racath?” Oron probed.

  “Um…” Racath blushed. He had grabbed an image at random from his thoughts. He hadn’t intended to make a pseudo-Nelle. “I…uhh….” The illusion vanished as Racath’s mind lost its focus, evanescing into a wisp of grey mist.

  Oron laughed at him, clapping him on the shoulder. “That’s good enough for today, I supposed. What you just made there, Racath, is called a shade. With practice, you can give it solidity and texture, making it feel real as well as look real. Once you master that, you can use your mind to telepathically control a shade, like a puppet. Eventually, you’ll learn to cast and control multiple shades at once. Tomorrow, we’ll start teaching you more offensive magic — and I’ll cast my own shades for you to use as targets.”

  Racath wiped the sweat from his forehead. “I like the sound of that. I need a good day of things on fire.” He grinned devilishly. “Do you think you can make your shades look like Mrak?”

  Oron smiled back at him. “We’ll see.”

  ——

  And so, the next day, they began discussing the most important topic for a Scorpion to master: War-Magicks. Like before, they would start by going over each the theory of each spell during breakfast before moving down into the pit. Oron would have him blast featureless shades into smoke using the various forms of energy, shaped into the diverse array of War-Magicks.

  This kind of magic came much more naturally to Racath. It wasn’t exactly easy, though — certain kinds of energy proved much more challenging than others. Electricity, for example, he found particularly difficult. Mage-lightning took a great deal of skill and talent to generate, and massive amounts of power to manipulate. Electric Magicks like “White Shock”, and “White Charge” drained his getu at a startlingly rapid rate.

  The first time that he managed to deplete his entire supply of magic was when he tried to make “White Lightning” twice in quick succession. He had succeeded in producing a pair of ivory lightning bolts that blasted from his hands, but it left his head spinning and his gut knotting.

  Telekinetic Magicks were less draining, but they were almost too easy. So easy they bored him. He mastered “Push of Glass”, “Glass Missile”, “Glass Concussion”, “Glass Zephyr”, “Glass Vice”, and the “Glass Harpoon” in a single morning. He definitely excelled with telekinetic spells in a way that might suggest a dosdom in force-based energy. But he felt none of the affinity and attraction towards it that Oron said he should feel for his dosdom.

  Telephotonics, light Magicks, proved only slightly more of a challenge: it took almost two days to master “Star Spear”, and the “Star Scalpel”.
But he found the whole idea of telephotonics to be overly ostentatious and flashy. It just seemed like overkill to him to incinerate someone with a compressed ray of light. Why not just light them on fire?

  And fire…now, fire he liked. Creating mage-fire wasn’t easy, but he was good at it. And when Oron taught him how to manipulate mage-fire into dozens of other Magicks, a whole world of possibilities opened up. He figured out several spells on his own without any help from Oron. Like when he discovered that he could compress mage-fire into a solid shape, and fire it out of his markara in the form of a high-velocity projectile that would detonate explosively on impact. Oron said it was called “Red Lance”, so named for the reddish hue that tinged mage-fire’s flames. Then he proceeded to show Racath even more wondrous things, such as “Red Lightning”, “Red Lash,” and “Red Claw”.

  ——

  Before Racath knew it, it was autumn. The leaves on the domus’ trees began to change. Their crisp edges would rub against each other in the gentle breeze, like a symphony of rustling parchment. The air grew pleasingly cooler and cooler. And there was that unique, marvelous smell of fall, filling the domus from earth to sky.

  By the time the leaves had gone from green to a clean ochre, Racath was nearly fluent in spoken Rotenic and had gone on to learn the calligraphic written form, in addition to Elven. He had learned how to use a sword, and how to improve his hand-fighting. He had mastery of more than thirty defined Magicks, and many other applications of common magical energy. He was educated on the world beyond the Grey Wall, knew dozens of mathematic and scientific formulae, and had read nearly half of the books in Oron’s library. While he still hadn’t found his corobna dosdom, he continued to search for it daily.

  And there was still more to come. Every day, Oron would show him more and more, and Nelle would sharpen his fighting further and further. All this untold knowledge…it made Racath feel powerful. Strong. He hungered for more.

  ——

  Racath sidestepped the iron cudgel that one of Oron’s shades was swinging at his head. Thrusting his open hand at the illusion, he made Glass Missile. An orb of magic-compressed air shot from his markara. The Magick projectile struck the shade across the chest, scattering it into a puff of grey smoke.

  “Good!” Nelle called from her perch on the edge of the pit as Racath deflected an attack from a second shade. “What year did the Jederic Church of Calisto first attempt to invade the Commonwealth of Io?”

  Recently, Oron had begun directing his shade puppets to fight back against Racath. Racath would then have to defeat several illusionary enemies at once, using a simple longsword Oron had lent him, his hands, Stingers, and magic. And, while Oron’s powerful mind was devoted to controlling a dozen illusions simultaneously, Nelle would fire academic questions at him from the sidelines.

  “Year 520!” Racath shouted in response, cutting a shade down with the longsword. “Third Age.”

  “What’s the capital city-state of the Majiskuran Enclave?”

  Racath smashed the sword down onto the iron club of another shade, knocking it off balance, then rammed the tip of his blade into its chest. “Adonna. But Tyre and its allies disputed that claim twice between Year 111 and 1262 of the Second Age.”

  Nelle grinned, dandling her feet out over the edge like she was playing in a river. “Yes sir! Where does the word faul come from?”

  Rolling his eyes, Racath answered. “It’s bite, in Rotenic. The disease fauleria was named for the word, since the victims often go fever-mad and try to bite anyone who approaches them.”

  He channeled fire down his markara. Rush of scarlet flame enveloped the blade of his sword, which he then proceeded to cut a shade in half with.

  “When an epidemic of fauleria broke out in the Human subcontinent of Okkarheim in Athair during the Third Age, those smitten with the plague were called faulers. It became a profane usage after the plague was eradicated.”

  “What is the name of the Magick you just used on your sword?” This time, it was Oron who asked, his eyes squeezed shut as he focused on controlling his shades.

  “Red Blade!” Racath answered quickly, rolling under a pair of shades that were attacking in unison. “Mage-fire. War-Magick. It only works because this sword’s edge is Shaeyéd steel, a material that can conduct magic.”

  Nelle glared at Oron. “I ask the questions here, sir!”

  It was Oron’s turn to roll his eyes.

  “Now,” Nelle said, returning her attention to Racath. “Assume a male Majiski has a mass of, say, ninety-five kilograms. He has a black markara, the surface of which is about six-hundred-eighty square centimeters in area. In grains, how much energy does this Majiski’s getu hold?”

  Racath extinguished the flame on his sword and made Red Fist — mage-fire rose in undulating tongues from his markara. When he drove his open palm into the next unlucky shade, a gout of bright red flame blasted out of his hand.

  “A little more than 41,000 grains!” he shouted over the roar of the fire.

  “And how do you know that?”

  “Because those are my statistics!”

  “Well aren’t you a smarty,” Nelle teased. “Alright then, how about a harder one?”

  “Try me!” Racath opened his left Stinger, wielding it in tandem with his sword. He blurred forward, devastating three more shades before any of them could lift their weapons against him.

  “When’s my birthday?”

  The question brought Racath up short. He stopped cold and looked up at the augur sitting on the wall, confused. “Wait, what?”

  Nelle grinned wickedly at him.

  Racath felt his face blanch white. “Ahh, piss.”

  The final shade’s cudgel walloped him in the back of the head. The illusion was only semi-solid, but the phantasmal weapon still had enough force behind it to knock Racath face-first into the sand.

  “Piss,” Nelle said curtly. “Is not an acceptable answer.”

  The shades faded away into smoke. Racath groaned, massaging the back of his head as extracted his face from the floor of the pit. “That’s not fair. You’ve never even told me your birthday.”

  “Did so, did so! Your first morning here, in the library. The 8th of Elur.”

  “That was good, Racath,” Oron interrupted

  He pulled himself to his feet. “Yeah? How good?”

  Oron shrugged. “Not perfect. You’re improving — we’re definitely making progress. But perfect is what we need from you.”

  Grimacing, Racath picked his sword back up. “Then let’s start again.”

  ***

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Blood on the Wind

  Notak gazed into the depths of his mug from beneath his hood. The murky light that managed to reach their private corner of the tavern made a mirror of the drink’s surface. The face in the reflection was not his. It was the usual illusion that he wore in public: a man with white-blond hair and pale, Human features. But the lightning-blue cat’s-eyes were his, and they stared relentlessly back at him.

  He swirled the muddy contents of his drink, and the small whirlpool within distorted the false reflection of platinum hair and white skin. The Elven eyes, however, remained clear. Nailed to him. Accusatory.

  “Will you stop keeping your head down so much?!”

  Rachel’s hiss cut through the tavern’s din of drunken shouting and boisterous laughter like a knife through a wool blanket. “The hood and the shadows are more than enough to hide your face, not to mention the illusions. No one is going to see your eyes.”

  Notak looked up at the she-Majiski sitting across the table from him. “I am not worried about being seen,” he said. His voice was quiet, but somehow it carried clearly through the taproom’s noise. “I am thinking.”

  Rachel huffed and set her own mug down on the table. “About what, exactly?” she shot back, brushing a strand of hair out of her silver eyes before crossing her arms over her chest. “You’ve been silent for ten minutes now.”

  The Elf
frowned at her. “I was wondering where we go from here.”

  “Well, don’t look at me,” Rachel said, her scowl deepening. “You’re the one in charge of planning stuff. I just follow and kill.”

  “I did not ask you to give an answer,” Notak responded impassively. “I was merely answering your question: I am thinking about our next step.”

  “Got any ideas, then?” Rachel challenged.

  Resisting the urge to sigh, Notak pushed his mug aside and leaned towards her. “I believe so. First, we need to reevaluate our objective. What is our end goal?”

  Rachel didn’t hesitate. “To find and kill every last fauling one of the Demons that pretend to be the Mnogo Pantheon.”

  Notak nodded. “And how do we do that?”

  “Find out where they have their gatherings, break in, and kill them all at once?” Rachel shrugged.

  This time, Notak could not suppress the sigh. “No. For one thing, they undoubtedly meet somewhere inside Castle Io. Trying to breach the walls is suicide.”

  Rachel snorted, frustrated. “And what if they all live inside Castle Io? At all times? What do we do then?”

  Notak held up a finger to halt her. “We already know for certain that they do not all reside within Castle Io. The letter we intercepted confirms that at least one of them, the goddess Tempest, resides in Oblakgrad. If I were them, I would have the nineteen gods scattered out between the cities.”

  “So they’re all in different castles,” Rachel groused. “That’s just as bad, if not worse.”

  “So we find the weak link. A god with a weakness that will give us an opening.”

  Rachel took one last drink from her mug and shoved it aside. “And what makes you think there is such a one, O Wise One?”

  “Hammon.” Notak answered, pulling several small books out of his satchel and laying them on the table: the manifests he had stolen from the Human merchant in Dírorth. “Mrak sent us chasing him down for a reason. He must be connected somehow to the Nineteen. Which means these manifests must have some relationship to the Demons we are looking for. Or at least one of them.”

 

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