by Garon Whited
“Karvalen is a mountain and a kingdom. Got it. How do you tell which is which?”
“Context. Or you ask. That’s what I do.”
“Right. We go through a magic door to the mountain of Karvalen, talk to T’yl, find Tort, and avoid being killed.”
“That last part is kind of a default,” I pointed out.
“But it’s always relevant.”
“True. I’m not sure we can easily gate into Karvalen, though. It has extensive defenses, and generating a spatial gate through them could be tricky. It’s no big deal to go to another universe—that sort of gateway doesn’t cross the three-dimensional plane of the wards—but point-to-point within a single space would have to breach—”
“Hold it,” Mary interrupted. “Can you simplify that, Professor?”
“Going through the wards with a gate is hard and may be fatal to people passing through it. However, you can go around the wards by going to another universe and bypassing them from there.”
“Still not too clear on that.”
“One end of a gate in this world, with the other end in Karvalen. Picture that.”
“Got it.”
“Now, draw an imaginary line between the two on a map—a circle around one of them. The line will pass through a big circle of force surrounding the city. With me so far?”
“Yes. The circle of force will interact with the line and try to stop you from traveling through it.”
“Correct. Now, pretend we’re back at the nexus point where we opened our gate to Zirafel.”
“Okay.”
“Now, open a gate there, with the other end in Karvalen. As far as this world is concerned, does the line cross anything?”
“I… no, I guess not. I can’t quite picture it.”
“If we’re visualizing a map, imagine the inter-universal gate is a hole in the page from one page to another. The hole doesn’t touch the circle. It appears inside it, and you can climb from one page to the other without ever encountering the circle.”
“Okay, I get that. So it’s actually easier to go around by using two inter-universal gates?”
“Well, there’s less active resistance,” I admitted. “It may not actually be easier. The easiest thing to do is go to Mochara—there are sure to be places there we can drop the other end of a gate. Then we ride north, maybe take a canal boat.”
“Huh. So we take a plane to a city, then get a cab?”
“Pretty much, yes. I think you’ve got it. Want to do some scrying for our drop point while I build a gate?”
“Apprentices are always happy to assist, aren’t they?”
“You’d be surprised.”
“Possibly. Well, this sure beats being bored.”
“I agree. Get off my lap and we’ll get started.”
“Can it wait about an hour?”
“We’re not exactly in a rush. I suppose it could wait a bit. Why?”
She kissed me in answer. An hour or two wasn’t all that long a delay.
Sunday, January 25th
We’ve been working and planning toward a trip to the mountain. I keep casting scrying spells with Mary; she’s pretty much got the hang of them. Another day of this and she’ll be casting them on her own to scout out where we should arrive. She’s looking over Mochara, down on the coast, since it’s practically impossible to get a good look at Karvalen.
We’re also continuing with language lessons. Mary and I can’t hold much of a conversation in Rethvenian or whatever it should be called, but practice is important. We try. I think she’s making fantastic progress, considering the real-world time involved.
I learn languages surprisingly quickly, but only because I drink my dinner. If I actually studied linguistics—the science of how languages are put together—would it be easier to absorb one? Or would it matter at all?
In keeping with her job as my intelligence-gathering assistant, Mary suggested we record a sunset from the Edge. Since we can’t actually watch one without catching fire, a recording would be a good first step toward understanding it. I agreed with her and set up a diamond—it was the clearest crystal I had, and that’s important when recording a visual. It should give us a good look later tonight.
She keeps coming up with good ideas. I may have to keep her.
Neither Amber nor T’yl has called back, yet. I’m being patient.
While waiting, I conducted a more thorough and methodical search through Zirafel. What I wanted was a smaller gate—something besides the Great Arch. I can’t place an outgoing call on the Great Arch, but if they had other gateways, maybe some less public or less used, they might be able to go anywhere. True, the idea didn’t ring any bells with my digested memories, but such lesser gates might not have been common knowledge, either. So I searched by spell, tendril, and eyeball.
Nope. So much for that idea. Why didn’t Zirafel have other gates? The only thing I can think of is a safety measure. They have one Great Arch; it connects to Tamaril. Having others in the same city might risk disrupting the permanently-open portal. Re-opening it, if it closed, might also risk a cross-connection. It seemed like a good reason, but apparently not enough people in Zirafel knew the practical considerations to be useful to me.
Now I’m working on an archway in the ruin of one of the grain exchanges—inside a broken grain silo, in fact. I would put it in the Palace, but the anti-entropy golems would erase it as graffiti. Or would they? Do they leave magical writing alone? Good question, and not one I’ll answer today.
I’m taking my time with the process because I want it to stick around for a while. I might need to run to Zirafel to gain time to run somewhere else. If I duck through a gate to Zirafel and vanish, anyone chasing me will be stuck here—at least, until they find my lesser gate, make their own, or travel in some more mundane fashion. They may choose not to risk it, or, at least, hesitate before chasing me through a choke point.
Is it cowardice to plan on running away? Or prudent strategy?
Mary insisted on a break after sunset. We’re not on a tight schedule; we’re not on a schedule at all, really. Besides, I’m learning to like using a small swimming pool for a bathtub. So, after sunset, we went out and caught breakfast.
Mary also wanted me to demonstrate my blood-drinking technique. I don’t really have one, other than to let it all out and wait until it finishes soaking into me. Still, for the actual bite-and-drink method, I bite a dazhu and take a bloody chunk out of it. My tongue can then burrow into the wound and force its way down into the body. It does seem to soak up blood much more quickly than my skin. Usually, my tongue hits an artery in the throat and writhes down through the neck, headed for the heart. A full-grown bull dazhu—think of a buffalo with curling ram-horns and longer legs—can turn into a dried-up carcass in about eleven seconds.
Eleven seconds. A human body can be drained of blood in eight-point-six seconds with an adequate vacuuming system, or so I’m told. Something the size of a cow should take longer. I suppose it does. About two-point-four seconds longer. Apparently my tongue qualifies as an “adequate vacuuming system.” Maybe I should start a carpet-cleaning business. I said as much to Mary, who clapped both hands over her mouth and laughed until bloody tears ran down her face.
I still don’t see what was so funny.
For now, though, I think we’ll stick to double-teaming our dinner. She bites it, drinks from it, then guts it. Any blood left in the body slithers out and slurps its way over to me.
While I sat on a dazhu corpse, waiting for what little blood Mary left behind to find its way out, Mary started carving off fresh meat for the morning. It hastened the draining process, too.
“New questions,” she warned.
“I do not fear your questions,” I pontificated pompously. “They only provide me with fresh opportunities to once again prove the magnitude of my ignorance.”
“I’ve got a couple of spots we could use in this Mochara place of yours, but neither of them is ideal. Still looking. But when w
e get there, what then? Do we clomp along to the mountain? Do we take a boat ride in the canal? And who are we? Do we try to make up new identities, or turn invisible? I ask because I don’t want the local magi and priests to get all bent out of shape at your return. Some of them are trying to kill you, right?”
“True. I’d like to avoid it, too,” I admitted. “I’m not sure what T’yl will come up with for sneaking us into town, but hopefully he’ll have an idea before we finish our own preparations.”
“If he doesn’t?”
“Then he’s taking is sweet time about it,” I groused. “I’ll call him, or try to, before we go to Mochara, but I’m not sitting here indefinitely.”
“I’ll get behind that. So, back to my questions?”
“Right. I’m tempted to try and sneak along, but you can give up on invisibility. It’s a damned complicated spell. Oh, we could do it,” I admitted. “We have time to set them up and gather enough power for it, but we’d have to put one on each of us—four, total, for you, me, Bronze, and your horse.”
“Clomper.”
“Clomper?”
“It needed a name. Since we’re not going through a desert, it may as well have a name.”
“Clomper, by all means. Anyway, we could also work some silencing spells to go with the invisibility spells and be darn near undetectable. Most invisibility spells aren’t perfect, though, so there are usually distortions or ripples. The real problem is other people. They don’t move out of the way. They even tend to try to walk through you—you look like an open space. It’s good for short-range things, yes, but usually it’s too much trouble to cast just to cross a courtyard, sneak across a room, that sort of thing. Going through a city is just asking to be run over.”
“Could you put an invisibility spell on me? I’ve always wanted to be invisible for a while.”
“Sure. Now?”
“No, we can do this around other people. It’s no fun to sneak around if there’s no one to fail to notice you.”
“A case of ‘if a thief goes invisible and there’s no one to see, is she still sneaking?’”
“Pretty much.”
“Okay. Let’s go back and see what you’ve found for destination points.”
We went back to the rooms and Mary reactivated the mirror. She left the spell intact but inactive, so we wouldn’t have to build it again. Oh, but she’s a smart one.
The locations she had in mind were large openings, mostly for horses and carts. One of her ideas, though, showed real out-of-the-box thinking. While I was confined in the basement, the canal by Mochara developed offshoots—little dead-end branches for parking canal boats, mainly for loading and unloading. A couple of these were covered over, like boat garages. The openings formed by the surface of the water and the building over it would work quite well indeed for our purposes, especially since they were already outside the city wall.
“Perfect,” I told her. She grinned and mimed a curtsey.
“Now that I’ve found us a place to go, what next?”
“Help me with the gate.”
“Am I qualified for that?”
“No. But you’re overqualified for scratching individual symbols into the wall. I’ll tie it all together, but extra hands—and another person stuffing magic into it—will make it go faster.”
“Huh,” she grunted, thinking, head cocked to the side. “Are you going to put up a power sphere around it?”
“No.”
“Wouldn’t it go faster? Since we’re going to dump all the power from the sphere into it anyway?”
“You’d think that. If I was going to make a gate in a hurry, I’d need a charged sphere already. As it is, a sphere charges over time and it uses some of that charge to maintain itself. In the short term, we can actually put more power into the project by hand.”
“But a sphere would let you cast the gate spell, boom, and be done with it?”
“Yep. It’s a long-term tactic, though.”
“Couldn’t you build several, then drain them off when we’re ready to go?”
“Yes, but that would take time away from building the gate, itself. There’s a point of diminishing returns on effort, you see. It’s like… I can go rent a crane, do the rigging, hoist the engine block, carefully swing it over, and settle it into a specially-built cradle. Or I can heave it up by hand, stagger two paces with it, and set it down. The first one works and is, technically, less actual effort, but the second one also works and works right now.”
“Too much prep work for the project?”
“That’s all I had to say?”
“Exactly.”
“Fair enough. Besides, the slow and sure method we’re using helps with the inscribing. I want this thing to be a gate we can empower later, if we have to, not merely a one-shot spell.”
“Okay. You’re the bossy wizard.”
“I think you mean ‘boss wizard’,” I corrected.
“I know what I meant. Come on; I want to see what you’ve got.”
Monday, January 26th
T’yl still hasn’t called. I sent Amber a message spell; she’s in Mochara and not behind the mountain’s defenses. It was a reminder to poke T’yl. I would have included a reply function, but it would have involved programming a location into it. Anyone who got a good look at the spell could use it to backtrack to me. I don’t feel ready for that.
The gate is going well, though. Mary takes the ideogram I want, carves it into the wall, and invests it with power. I’m doing the same thing, which moves us along almost twice as fast. I still have to tie the ideogram into the larger spell structure and make it part of the overall whole, but it’s enormously helpful to have it pre-made and waiting for me when I get to it.
“How do you target the destination?” she asked, between ideograms. “Is it part of the inscription?”
“No, this is the basic warp-a-hole-in-space spell. Targeting is trickier. The usual method—the one we’ll use here—is to visualize where you’re going and lay your will on the spell. I have some ideas for improved controls on targeting, and your thought—putting the destination address into the structure of the spell—has merit. But I don’t want to leave examples lying around where anyone could find them.”
“Got it. So you’re going to picture the mouth of the boat-barn and hope it locks on?”
“It should. It’ll seek out something at the other end with some level of correspondence to the opening at this end.”
“That’s why you squared off the hole? To make the shape resemble the shape of the boat-barn opening?”
“Yep.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier to use a mirror?”
I moved a couple of rocks I was using for stepping-stones and sat down, puzzled.
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Well, it seems to me if you had a mirror big enough to go through, you could use it to scry wherever you want, right? Then, when you’ve got your point of view right—as though it was already an open gate—then you could actually open the gate and go through. Couldn’t you? Or would it break the mirror?”
“It’s a good thing I already sat down.”
“Why?”
“I’m dumbfounded. That’s brilliant. My brain must be stiffening up from disuse.”
“So, it won’t break the mirror?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Who cares? I can put a mirror back together. I can even create a temporary one with a spell. In fact, we could cast a series of spells to define an area for the scrying, actually scry through it, link it to a gate, fire up a gate spell…” I trailed off. Mary was obviously pleased.
“Don’t feel bad. You’re old and stodgy,” she teased, playfully.
“Are you sure you’re a natural blonde?” I countered.
“Yes. Imagine what I could do with hair dye.”
“No!”
“Why not?”
“I suspect you’re already smarter than me.”
“I suspect we think differently, that�
�s all.” She came over and kissed the top of my head and ran her fingertips over the hair on my face. “Does it always grow so fast? You’ve only been at it two days; this is going to need a trim, soon.”
“Spell,” I told her. “Variation on a healing spell. Instead of telling my body to fix a problem, I told it to devote its energies to growing hair. It’s not all that good a spell, though—it’s like using a desktop computer for a hand calculator. I can probably get a much faster growth rate if I—”
“Stop,” Mary interrupted. “It’s working fine as it is, and the beard is coming in nicely. I’ll give it a bit of a attention tomorrow to even it out and you’ll look all dashing and romantic.”
“And get burned at the stake, probably.”
“What?” she asked. “Why?”
“Because making me look dashing and romantic would clearly involve a pact with the Devil.”
“I’ll risk it. Now, what’s the next thing I need to carve? And can you sharpen this chisel? My fingernails aren’t as brutal as yours.”
“Thank God,” I muttered.
“I heard that.”
“Chisel. Right. On it.”
Tuesday, January 27th
Still no word from T’yl. I’m wondering how hard it can be to find a way to smuggle me into a mountain. If it’s really that much of an issue, maybe I should walk in boldly and damn the consequences.
Come to that, how would that go over? What if I walked in, went up the road to the upper courtyard, and quietly went to my rooms? No fuss, no fanfare, but no sneaking, either. What if I calmly and quietly went home? Would people scream and run? Would there be panic in the streets? Riots? Would Bad Guys come out of the woodwork to take potshots at me?
I don’t know. And I’m starting to be annoyed by that.
The gate is pretty much finished. Mary and I scribed ideograms all around the inside of the hole in the grain silo, then she pushed power at me while I finished tying everything together. It’s not a true enchantment, not from the standpoint of a permanently-functional magical item. Instead, it’s an inscribed spell, built to be used over and over again without the need for a spellcaster to build the spell structure. It’s much more fragile, and it won’t last forever. If it’s left alone, it could be there for centuries. But if it’s ever fully discharged—say, someone fires it up, goes through, and doesn’t shut it off—it’ll burn itself up and cease to be.