Lu Bei chewed on a claw. “That, master, sounds kind of like a teleportation spell to me.”
“It does, doesn’t it? But you heard the Blood King. That spell’s going to take a lot of study and practice.”
“Which you’re currently doing, master.”
“I guess so. But surely he would explain the concepts first though, right?”
Lu Bei shrugged. “He gave you this to work on, so he must want you to work on it. Teleportation spell or not.”
“Well, if I manage to cast it successfully and it teleports me somewhere, then that must be what he intended to happen. Anyway, I don’t think it matters right now. I’m not even close to accomplishing anything with this spell, aside from busting my kneecaps.”
Turesobei held the scroll up to the light and stared at the page for a minute…five minutes…ten minutes.
The first character suddenly extended into the page, as if it wasn’t a flat piece of paper but a box with depth. Then another character appeared, stacked behind the first. His mind went fuzzy and his stomach churned with nausea. The depth disappeared and once again it was a normal page with normal characters. He grasped his temples and focused on his breathing to try to keep from throwing up. It took several minutes for the room to stop spinning.
“You okay, master?”
“I’m fine,” he groaned.
Lu Bei put a hand on his shoulder and frowned. “You don’t sound like it.”
Turesobei shooed him away. “I think I’m on to something.”
He lifted the paper again and twisted it one way and then another. He saw the characters again, but had to look away after a few moments. He slumped back against the wall, sucking wind as a wave of nausea passed through him.
“I’m going to need more tea. We have a lot of work to do.”
“Yes, sir! Right on it, sir!”
Within a minute, Lu Bei brought him a steaming bowl of black tea with hints of cinnamon. No one could get a pot of tea brewed faster.
He took a careful sip. “Lu Bei, can you see through my eyes to make a precise copy of a character I’m looking at? Or do you have to record from your own perspective?”
“I already record everything from your perspective, master.”
“Oh, I didn’t realize that.” He thought of making out with Iniru and Kurine, of time he spent alone, of going to the bathroom. “Oh! Lu Bei, the things you must’ve seen! I’m so sorry.”
Lu Bei laughed. “I don’t see all your disgusting kissing sessions, if that’s what you’re worried about. I can go into a sleep-like state so I don’t have to be aware of what I’m recording. I can then retrieve the memories later, if needed. I learned long ago with Master how to quickly shut down before seeing what can’t be unseen.”
Turesobei breathed a sigh of relief. “That’s comforting.”
“For you and me both!”
“So if I look at a character, you can record it for me?”
“Yes and no, master. I can pick herbs and brew tea, but I can’t physically write anything. It’s a long story. However, I can display writing you’ve seen onto page seventy-six if needed. It won’t last long, though. A few minutes, ten at the most.”
“Page seventy-six?”
“Another long story.”
“So that’s why you’re not also a spell book?”
“Master tried to make it so I could be a diary and a spell book. But that didn’t work out.”
“So do I need to do anything different?”
“If the characters are as intricate as the ones on the scroll, then you’ll need to give me about a minute to make sure I’ve got it recorded exactly right. I take it you’re seeing something more on the page than what’s obvious….”
“Each character, somehow, is a six-sided cube, like gaming dice. We’ve only been seeing the front side of the character so far. I don’t understand how, and it practically melts my brain, but it’s all there if I look at it just right.”
“Three-dimensional characters for a spell?” Lu Bei asked incredulously. “I’ve never heard of such a thing. But if we were only reading one out of every six characters, then no wonder we thought it was gibberish.”
“There’s no guarantee it will make sense when we have all the characters.”
“True. Ixtachi characters are rarely used for spell work because they often have multiple meanings. Master, like most wizards, didn’t like the risk involved with using Ixtachi.”
Great, he was casting a spell from a language Chonda Lu considered too complicated.
“Given how much looking at them is screwing with your head, master, when you cast the spell and have to envision these—”
“It’s going to be rough. I know.”
“Are you ready to start?”
“Not yet. I need plenty of tea and some food to snack on. And I need quiet. Tell the others not to disturb me for any reason and send word to the Blood King that I’m working on magic in my room all day.”
“As you wish, master.”
Turesobei meditated until Lu Bei returned with a pot of tea.
“Was the Blood King upset?”
“He glared, raised an eyebrow then waved me off.”
“He probably knows what I’m doing.”
“Your companions expressed concern. Kurine said she loves you and good luck with whatever you’re doing.”
A servant brought in water, biscuits and strawberries. He ate a bit, finished off his tea and took out a sheet of paper. He wrote down the first visible character.
“I wonder what orders the others go in?”
Lu Bei shrugged. “No idea. I would guess the visible one is first then left, back, right, bottom and top.”
“Any particular reason?”
“Just seems right, master.”
“Why not?” Turesobei said. “Okay, let’s do it.”
Lu Bei landed on the table beside Turesobei’s paper. “Good luck, master!”
Then Lu Bei turned into a book and Turesobei stared at the scroll until he saw the characters in three dimensions. He focused on the character on the left side of the cube long enough, he hoped, for Lu Bei to record it accurately. With his head spinning, he flipped through the diary until he found page seventy-six. A large copy of the character glistened in red ink on the center of the page. He carefully copied it down then waited. The character faded away a minute later.
After he finished all the characters on the first cube, he curled up beside the table and fell instantly asleep. Lu Bei woke him half an hour later. He drank tea and ate some strawberries.
“Ninety more to go. This is going to take a while.”
“You could just do a few each day, master.”
He shook his head. “I want to get it over and done with.”
He copied characters, meditated, napped, vomited twice, drank seven cups of tea and ate a plate of biscuits and two bowls of strawberries. After he finished staring at the last character, he passed out. When he woke, the image had already faded from page seventy-six. He cursed and started over. Somehow, he stayed conscious and kept his hand steady long enough to copy down the last character. He vomited and passed out a few feet away from his sleeping platform.
* * *
He woke the next morning to the sound of water streaming into the tub in his room. He sat up, regretted it immediately and lay back down.
Enashoma loomed over him with a scowl on her face. “You reek.”
“Sorry.” He rolled over, expecting to see empty bowls scattered about and vomit on the floor. “Hey, the room’s clean!”
“Lu Bei said you were finished, so I brought some servants in to get you tucked in and clean the place up.”
“Servants were in here cleaning? They didn’t wake me.”
“You slept like you were dead,” Enashoma said. “The servants took your clothes to clean them. I’m going to leave so you can take a bath. As soon as you’re finished, you can join us all for breakfast.”
After a thorough bath, he ate a
small breakfast, dodged questions about his work, assured them he was fine, then retreated to his room. Over the next four hours, Lu Bei taught him how to pronounce all the new characters.
Turesobei stared at the page of characters he had copied down. It didn’t make sense. He meditated then stared some more. It still didn’t make sense. It might be a teleportation spell, but he couldn’t reason out its purpose based on the characters or their translations.
He groaned. “How the heck am I supposed to cast this?”
“You know the energy activation required, master.”
“There has to be more to it than that. And I’m not certain the characters are in the right order.”
“You could try the same method you used to figure out how to do the storm spells.”
All he’d had to do with the storm spells was let his mind go free, attune himself to the kavaru and imagine he was Chonda Lu.
“How would channeling my inner Chonda Lu help me with a spell even you don’t recognize?”
“Just because Master never used a spell like this doesn’t mean he’d be unable to figure one out. It’s worth a try, right?”
Turesobei nodded. “Can’t hurt.”
He spread the sheets of paper with all eight hundred and ninety-four characters out in front of him. He relaxed his eyes and deepened his breathing. It took over an hour of imagining he was Chonda Lu before all the pieces of the spell began to fall into place. It took several more hours to fully decipher the correct order for the characters and how to activate them using the spell of locating that which is hidden.
“I know how to do it.”
“That’s great, master. What’s it for?”
“I still don’t have a clue. And it feels incomplete.”
“Maybe the big bad BK hasn’t given all of the spell to you yet.”
“Only he would know.”
Exhausted, Turesobei crawled into the covers on his sleeping mat and slept until dawn. Iniru didn’t visit. Hopefully it was only because she knew he was working hard. He ate some berries and drank tea.
“Skipping breakfast, master?”
He shook his head. “I just want to give the spell a try first.”
With the original scroll in hand, he chanted the spell and channeled the energy as if he were casting the spell of locating that which is hidden.
Kenja gathered around him then surged through him.
The room blurred and spun around him.
With ten times the strength as before, the unknown force jerked him forward. Only he didn’t fall to his knees. Instead, a white nothingness surrounded him as he was wrenched away from the Nexus and into somewhere else.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
The place Turesobei found himself in was not entirely unlike the Shadowland. Except where the Shadowland was a place of barren rock, indecipherable ruins and endless shadows, this was a place of pervading silence, diffuse light and formlessness—devoid of smells, textures and color, as if it were nothing more than a half-forgotten dream.
Despite the seeming lack of a sun or moon above, there was an abundance of light. He took a few steps and spun around. Pale mists draped the land so that he could see no more than a dozen paces ahead, and the sky was obscured by swirls of illuminated clouds. He started to call out but stopped himself. Not knowing what horrors might lurk here, he didn’t want to draw unwanted attention.
Obviously he had teleported. But where was he? He’d never read about any place like this. Had the spell gone wrong? Or was this where he was supposed to be? And if it was, what was he supposed to do now? And if this wasn’t the right place, what then? Would the Blood King know how to find him? He cursed the Blood King for not telling him more about the spell.
A sudden emptiness filled him. He felt a deep sense of loss. Something was missing. Some important part of him. Only he had no idea what it was. He shivered and wrapped his arms across his body.
A mournful wail echoed through the clouds. The mists swirled nearby. He froze, watched the fog and listened. But he didn’t notice anything. He called on his kenja-sight. Nothing happened. His kavaru failed to respond. Not even the slightest surge of kenja, internal or external, answered him. Closing his eyes, he summoned all his focus….
Still nothing. Was there a dampening effect inherent to this place?
He glanced down. Then stumbled back in terror.
His kavaru was missing.
He clawed at his chest and neck. There was nothing there.
For the first time in his life, the stone was gone. Despite the fact that it hung from a silver chain around his neck, Turesobei’s kavaru had always refused to come off. Unlike other human wizards, his kavaru literally and inexplicably could not be removed, by him or anyone else. No wonder he had felt less than whole. Part of him—the strongest part of him—was gone.
Teleporting must’ve done something to it and it had fallen off when he arrived here. Mists veiled the ground, so he dropped to his hands and knees and sifted through the loamy soil. It had to be here somewhere. It had to be. His heart thundered wildly as he pawed at the ground. Tears stung his eyes. How was he going to escape this place without his kavaru? How was he going to do anything without it? That kavaru made him who he was. Without it he was nobody—just a common baojendari boy. The Blood King would have no use for him like this. His sister and friends would suffer and he’d have no way to protect them, no way to help them.
He felt lost. So impossibly lost. He had to get control of himself.
A dream. This had to be a dream. He tried to cast the spell of dreams revealed, but without his kavaru, he couldn't cast anything.
* * *
He knelt and forced himself to calm down by using deep-breathing exercises. The kavaru couldn’t actually be missing. It was probably a side effect of this dream world. And it this wasn't a dream, there was bound to be some other logical explanation.
Maybe Lu Bei had entered along with him. He might have answers. He stood and glanced around.
“Lu Bei?” he whispered.
No response came. He whispered the fetch’s name again and waited. Still nothing.
Another mournful wail tore through the silence. It sounded much closer now. He had to do something.
“Lu Bei!” Throwing caution to the wind, he called desperately into the mist.
The mists parted and a ghostlike creature flew toward him. It was human-shaped but no bigger than one of the hounds. A writhing, smoke-colored cloak hung from its shoulders and hooded its face. Bands of ashen cloth swathed its limbs and razor claws jutted out from its hands. From within the hood, glowing yellow eyes flared as they focused on Turesobei. Then it wailed again. Up close, its cry was so terrible that, for a moment, Turesobei considered falling to his knees and giving up. He had no sword, no kavaru, no abilities. There was no point in trying to fight it.
The demon lunged for him.
Turesobei snapped out of the trance, ducked under the demon’s attack, darted out from underneath it and sprinted away. He careened recklessly through the mists. One hand unconsciously clutched at his chest where Chonda Lu’s kavaru should hang.
Without magic, he couldn’t defend himself and couldn’t find a way out. He had never before felt so alone…so helpless…so useless. All he could do was stay alive until a solution presented itself or until the Blood King rescued him.
He glanced back. The ghostlike demon was catching up.
A second demon-ghost popped up through the mists ahead, directly in his path.
Turesobei slid, intending to pass safely under its flashing claws.
He didn’t make it.
The claws raked through his clothes and skin and the uppermost layer of muscle tissue. Blood sprayed into the air. The shimmering ruby raindrops contrasted sharply against the pale, alien environment. A biting cold pierced deeper than the claws. It tore all the way to the bone and deeper still, to scrape away a fragment of his soul.
Turesobei cried out and convulsed, his arms and legs flailing. H
is eyes snapped shut and he couldn’t force them open. He was entirely defenseless. There was nothing he could do to stop the demons from ripping him to shreds, body and soul.
Yet moments passed and they didn't attack. The convulsions calmed. His eyes peeled open onto an absurd scene. The droplets of his blood drifted languidly through the air like dandelion seeds. And the demons flicked long, purple tongues out to catch them. With each drop they consumed, hues of yellow and red stained the demons’ gray forms.
Turesobei clutched an arm over the bleeding wounds on his chest. With the other arm, he carefully dragged himself across the ground and out from between the pair of demons. Once he was far enough away, he lifted himself into a crouch.
Suddenly, both demon-ghosts noticed their meal escaping. Their heads swiveled in unison to face him. Then, chittering angrily, they charged.
“Lu Bei! Anyone! Help me!” Turesobei tried to run but slipped and fell instead.
A pair of claws swiped at him. He rolled to the right. Another set of claws raked toward him and he rolled back. He jumped up and ran.
Claws scraped across his back, drawing blood and screams. His legs seized up and he plowed face first into the ground. Ghost claws struck him repeatedly, ripping deeper and deeper, stealing blood and life force from him.
He tried to get up, but it was too late. Only minor convulsions rippled through his limbs now. There wasn’t enough energy left for anything more.
Using the last of his strength, he forced his eyes open. If this was the end, he would face his killers bravely. He turned his head and watched the ghost-demon bare its fangs and prepared to devour him.
A screech pierced the silent mists. “Wooooooo!”
Two miniature fireballs streaked through the air and slammed into the demons. The ghosts wailed as their tattered rags caught fire. A third tiny fireball hit the demon Turesobei could see square in the chest. With a final wail, the ghost fled.
Lu Bei zipped in and hovered over him.
“Am I ever…glad to…see you,” Turesobei gasped.
The Blood King’s Apprentice Page 17