Southwest Truths (Semiautomatic Sorceress Book 3)

by Kal Aaron

She knew why they didn’t talk about it more. The Elders didn’t like admitting they didn’t know something. Like everything inconvenient, they brushed it away and pretended it didn’t matter.

  Tradition and political jockeying had always weakened the Society. They could learn a lot from the Shadows and how they approached their knowledge-sharing. It wasn’t always perfect, but every country in the world now had access to the same basic technology. Different Sorcerers couldn’t share techniques successfully, but knowledge was different.

  Lyssa sighed. “Now I think of it, I should have stopped by and chatted with Tricia and Fred before sending them away. I might end up dead.”

  “Are you forgetting the main purpose of your current trip is to lure out potential assassins?” Jofi asked. “It’d be unwise to visit your foster parents until you can assure their safety. Should you die, at least you know they are safe.”

  “That’s comforting, in a depressing sort of way.” Lyssa chuckled. “What do you think about all this? You’ve not said much one way or another. I know you’ve been trying to keep quiet during the big conversations, but you’ve been more quiet than usual.”

  Between Tristan and Aisha, she couldn’t help but worry that Jofi suspected the truth. There wasn’t much she could do now except hope the seal lasted long enough for her to take out any rogues.

  Death haunted all Torches. The idea of meeting her end didn’t scare Lyssa. She just couldn’t stand the idea of dying without taking her killer with her.

  “You’ve brought all the necessary ammo, including your showstoppers,” Jofi replied. “I’m confident you’ll do what is necessary given that, though I do believe Elder Samuel’s conclusions were correct.”

  “Which conclusions?” Lyssa asked.

  “This is an extreme risk to your life based on the testimony of a dangerous man whose goals overlap but don’t mirror yours.”

  “We’re close to breaking through to the truth.” Lyssa shrugged. “Quitting now wouldn’t make me any safer, and I’d spend the rest of my life wondering if I could have found my brother.”

  “Lyssa, are you attempting to hide something from me?” Jofi asked.

  Her breath caught, and her heart rate kicked up. That’d come out of nowhere.

  “Why do you say that?” Lyssa asked, injected amusement into her voice to try to throw him off-track.

  “It’s been obvious in recent conversations that you’re attempting not to speak plainly,” Jofi replied. “I didn’t understand why, but when I considered the conversations, it became obvious I was the common factor in all of them. The most likely explanation is there is something specific you’re trying to keep from me.”

  “You’re my partner.” Lyssa smiled. “I’m not keeping anything important from you.”

  “Your view of importance might not be the same as mine. I also don’t fully understand your relationship with Lee and how that relates to the most recent incidents.”

  “He’s just somebody Samuel had watching me back in the day,” Lyssa offered, the lie twisting her stomach. “Before I got you. After twelve years of being a Torch, you pile up all sorts of enemies and contacts. Some of them will inevitably come back to haunt you. Occupational hazard.”

  “I don’t recall you mentioning emptiness spirits in my presence before, but you had extensive knowledge of them,” Jofi said. “I find that curious, given you don’t have extensive knowledge of other spirits.”

  Lyssa shrugged. “I already explained that in front of Tristan. Remember? I read a lot about them back in the day. It doesn’t matter. I don’t think it’s an emptiness spirit we’ll be facing when we get to Last Remnant.”

  At least, she hoped not. Her little darkness trick might have worked against weaker spirits, but Jofi would swallow her whole if she tried it on his unsealed form.

  “What if nothing happens and you find your brother’s regalia?” Jofi asked. “It’s not impossible that he’s dead.”

  “I know,” Lyssa snapped. “I’ve already accepted that and admitted it to several people, but that doesn’t change what I have to do. If the regalia’s there, I’ll shake the entire island until I find out the truth. Nobody has a decent explanation for why it took so long other than, ‘Sometimes these things happen.’ I can’t find a single Sorcerer who’s ever heard of it taking that long for a regalia to return to the Vault of Dreams outside of weird rumors about stuff from thousands of years ago.”

  “Then you acknowledge that it’s theoretically possible,” Jofi replied.

  “It’s theoretically possible that I’m the rightful Queen of France, but that doesn’t make it true.” Lyssa stepped away from the rail. “At this point, I don’t know what to think, but my instincts tell me going to Last Remnant will help. Or at least that it’ll end this.”

  “Tristan St. James is using you. He admitted as much. I don’t trust him.”

  “Sure, and I’m using him, too. We don’t have to trust him. We just have to know he won’t try to kill me the first chance he gets.” Lyssa smiled. “For now, let’s just enjoy the trip. I don’t think we’ll get this much quiet for a while.”

  Lyssa jogged up the stairs from the passenger cabins. Sailors scurried about on the top deck, inspecting and securing anything that was loose. She kept forgetting she needed to get used to the overwhelming sensation of sorcery pressing on her from the defenses around Last Remnant and the island itself. She took some deep, calming breaths.

  She sometimes wondered how other Illuminated got used to it. It felt like someone was always squeezing her lungs and was another reason she didn’t like visiting the island. As far as she knew, the sensation didn’t lessen with time. Only people’s perception of it lessened as they got used to it.

  Dense gray fog surrounded the yacht. It didn’t penetrate the field, allowing everybody on board to complete their final preparations with little trouble but not letting them see a yard in front of the boat.

  Intan jogged away from a life preserver he’d been inspecting. “You come to see the final approach, Lyssa?”

  She nodded. “It’s been years since I last came here. Something about it reminds me of what’s supposed to be special about sorcery.”

  “Same with me.” Intan smiled. “No offense, Lyssa, but what you do as a Torch doesn’t impress me the way Last Remnant does.”

  “That’s kind of the point.” Lyssa laughed. “I don’t think any individual Illuminated could stand up to the concentration of spells, rituals, and shards they have there.”

  “It makes me wonder what Lemuria was like.”

  “I can’t imagine,” she said and added, “No one knows. I guess everyone was more concerned about surviving than writing anything down, but at least we still have this place.”

  “It’s why I love this job.” Intan pointed toward the ship’s bow. “I can visit the greatest place on Earth even though I’m not a Sorcerer, and I get to do it more than most of you. When I get tired of it, I can leave.”

  Lyssa offered a polite nod, not wanting to admit she didn’t like going to Last Remnant even though she was impressed by it. Shadows suffered discrimination by the Society, but they were also free of most of the Society’s politics.

  Thunder boomed in the sky and lightning bolts descended from the heavens, striking the water again and again. The fog cleared, but the fierce wind pushed sheets of rain toward them. The water cascaded down the spells protecting the ship and flowed over the invisible field. Small droplets made it through the barrier and sprinkled the deck.

  Lyssa took a deep breath and slowly let it out. This was the part she never liked on the final approach: the storm barrier. It wasn’t hard to picture how a couple of shards or a spell failing might end with them on the bottom of the Indian Ocean. The barrier was an effective defense against the ships and vessels that managed to get close by somehow avoiding the misdirection spells in the area.

  Intan squinted into the distance. “It’ll be fine, Lyssa. The captain checked all the key shards before we left. We’ll
get through the storm without any trouble.”

  Lightning continued to flash around them, forming a white wall in the sky. The boat shimmied, but its protective enchantments kept the motion mild. Lyssa didn’t usually do well on boats, but she’d never had any trouble with the transports to and from Last Remnant.

  Lyssa opened her mouth to ask Intan a question, but the continuous resounding roar of the thunder drowned out anything she tried to say. She popped up her collar and slipped on her mask to protect her from the now-constant sprinkle making it through the barrier.

  Intellectually, she understood that the final storm barrier wasn’t that large. Passing through it with the key shards took less than ten minutes, but the relentless lightning strikes, some barely missing the boat, and the raging bellow of the weather set her heart to pounding, more out of excitement than fear.

  The transition was sudden. One minute, the sky was filled with lightning, and the next, blue skies and pleasant clouds hung overhead, with the dark storm ending in a clean line behind the yacht.

  “Welcome back, Lyssa,” Intan said, gesturing at the island. “Welcome to Last Remnant.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Massive sheer cliffs and jagged mountains ringed the perfectly circular island on all sides. Glowing small and medium barrier islands formed a maze in the sea around Last Remnant. Though their placement looked haphazard from the surface, when looking directly down, they were arranged to trace huge versions of the arcane sigils used to conceal the island and help channel the storm barrier, among other defenses. There was a reason the Society had managed to keep the location of Last Remnant secret for thousands of years.

  Individual Sorcerers and shards had limits. Rituals took time, but the Society’d had ten thousand years to refine the defenses and spells on the island, including updating them with each iteration of Shadow technology. Even the rise of planes had only presented a minor challenge. After all, the island’s defenses weren’t only about keeping out the Shadows.

  Although every Illuminated visited the island, most couldn’t get there without the help of one of the sanctioned transports and their myriad shards. It was a vestige of a time when the political future of the Society was unclear.

  The defensive spells even kept the island off satellite images. The internet was filled with alleged pictures of the island, but none was the real thing.

  The Society had even encouraged younger, tech-savvy Illuminated to flood the net with wrong information. Everyone knew Last Remnant was in the Indian Ocean, but few had any idea how to get there, let alone defeat the spells protecting the island.

  It wasn’t as simple as someone selling a location. Without the necessary shards or spells, it was almost impossible to make it to the island without going off-course, and the storm barrier waited for the lucky few.

  A single narrow inlet provided the only passage past the cliffs and mountains into Last Remnant proper. Though the yacht slowed from the full cruising speed it had used to zip across the ocean faster than a plane, it was still closing with startling speed on the inlet, zigging and zagging among the islands.

  Lyssa held her breath, worry finally seeping in. The last time she’d come to Last Remnant, her captain hadn’t used such an aggressive approach. She’d hate to have traveled halfway across the world and end up in a shipwreck right outside the island and need to swim to shore.

  The yacht soon cleared the barrier islands, slowing as it passed into the inlet to a speed most people would consider sane. Massive glyphs and sigils ran up the cliff faces on either side. She had thought Tristan’s trick with the dome impressive, but that was nothing compared to the sobering power on display.

  The mountains and cliffs gave way to the inner island, which was surrounded by water. The artificial nature of its construction was obvious even from the observation deck of the yacht. A dense tropical jungle abutted an arid desert on one side, with frosty tundra on the other side. Dense forests ran up against swamps and a fiery volcanic wasteland with an exact line separating the biomes.

  Lyssa had been told they originally wanted to create Last Remnant as a paradise, but some Sorcerers feared they wouldn’t be able to refine their abilities without extreme environments. They’d settled on creating pockets of everything they’d thought they might need.

  She was half-convinced it was a horrible accident they were trying to explain after the fact, but it didn’t matter now. No one seemed interested in changing the setup of Last Remnant. After a few thousand years, why bother?

  Soft, rolling plains and grasslands broken by trees covered the center of the main island to the city limits. Gleaming white towers arranged in perfect concentric circles rose from the ground, passages and walkways spread among them with mathematical precision. The towers surrounded an interior lake. A palace of crystal spires floated above it. It was the Heart of Remnant, where the Tribunal lived and ruled the entirety of the Illuminated Society.

  Lyssa hugged her chest, taking a moment to let the sorcerous power of the island pass over and through her. She’d thought it extreme on the way, but here it washed over her like a suffocating current.

  There was so much power for such a tiny population. The bulk of the Illuminated lived away from Last Remnant, leaving the full-time Sorcerer population in the hundreds, though the Shadow servants and workers were numbered over ten thousand.

  Intan and the other sailors on deck reached into their pockets and pulled out plain half-masks marked with stylized Lemurian script. Coming to Last Remnant was always strange. It was like a costume party, given that all Illuminated were expected to wear their regalia except when sleeping, and the Shadows were also required to wear masks. It was a place where everyone was expected to embody abstract ideals.

  The yacht continued to slow as it approached a long black pier. Sailors and dockworkers, aided by constructs humanoid and not, scurried around, moving cargo to and from the dozen or so boats docked there. Even the largest vessels were modest by the standards of the outside world. There were no big cargo ships, tankers, or anything near the size of a cruise liner.

  They did not need large ships. Last Remnant was self-sufficient and had been since before the rise of the most ancient Shadow civilizations. Technology and imports were carefully controlled and limited.

  The yacht came to a gentle stop, with the sailors unwinding ropes and hopping off the boat to secure it to the pier. For all the sorcery available, sometimes the simplest solutions worked the best.

  Lyssa stared at the Heart. It was time to get her bag and head out. She’d achieved what she’d set out to do. She had returned to Last Remnant.

  A young female servant stood outside Lyssa’s guest room in a flowing ruffly full-length blue dress and a rigid blue face mask with yellow eyes and a fixed smile. She motioned to a door and handed Lyssa a small sigil-inscribed shard key. The girl had appeared at the dock to take Lyssa to her accommodations. It was a short walk, only ten minutes, and the girl seemed reluctant to speak more than the bare minimum necessary, which was not unfamiliar to Lyssa when dealing with servants on Last Remnant. Not every Illuminated remembered their servants were worthy of respect.

  “Will you need anything else, Miss Corti?” the girl asked in Lemurian.

  Lyssa unlocked the door and stepped inside, smiling at the huge, fluffy bed. It was a step up from the roach motel in LA, though she was already missing her television. She had a lovely view of the docks, but it wasn’t the same as watching trashy TV starring people of questionable character.

  “This is fine for now,” Lyssa replied in the same language. “Thank you.”

  The girl motioned to a small glass bell atop a table in the center of the room. “The shard is attuned to me personally. Ring it if you need anything from me, and I will come. My name is Sumira. I will be your servant during your visit here. If you would prefer someone else, please let me know, and I’ll arrange for them to replace me.”

  Lyssa shook her head. “I can’t imagine needing anyone else. Th
anks for all your help. I’m good.” She didn’t need to force a smile because of her mask. She’d forgotten how uncomfortable the realities of daily life on Last Remnant made her. “I’ll let you know when I’m hungry, but I ate not all that long ago on the yacht.”

  Sumira bowed her head. “As you wish, Miss Corti.” She closed the door.

  Lyssa pulled out her cell phone. No signal. It had been worth a shot.

  She wasn’t sure why she’d even bothered to bring it. Habit, mostly. She might need a camera at some point, but she doubted it.

  There were no cell phone towers on Last Remnant. There were also no computers and not much electricity. Sorcery powered everything, including the floating wooden arms of the clock on the wall. In some ways, the place was a throwback to a distant pre-industrial past, but it was hard to claim that a place that had a floating palace and people who could fly was less advanced than the outside world.

  Lyssa walked over to the window with a frown. She wasn’t here as a tourist. The accommodations didn’t matter, and her entertainment was irrelevant. If everything went well, she’d be gone sooner rather than later. If it went poorly, she’d be dead and not in a position to care.

  Was Tristan already here? She’d worried about being attacked on the yacht, but the trip had been the same as she remembered, a pleasant diversion followed by a few minutes of terror and excitement. She would stick to the plan, first visiting the Vault of Dreams and going on from there. As long as she avoided wandering into dark corners or the mountains by herself, she wouldn’t get jumped right away.

  “Do you ever miss this place?” Jofi asked. “It’s been some time since you last visited. Ten years.”

  “I don’t like it. Never have. I think I have too American a mindset to genuinely appreciate it.”

  “What does being American have to do with it?”

  “All these masked servants and the extreme class-system stuff.” Lyssa waved her hand. “I get it. Being able to use sorcery does make us fundamentally different, but it still doesn’t sit right with me.”