Hopefully, others would come for him quickly. The problem was that they wouldn’t even know where he had gone. Sam had snuck into the Study Hall, but more than that, he had slipped into a part of the Study Hall that others couldn’t even reach. Tara couldn’t get there without the vrandal, and it was unlikely that anyone within the Academy knew how to access that place. They wouldn’t know what had taken place. They wouldn’t know where to find him.
They might realize that he was missing, but it might take too long for them to find that he was gone and even longer to figure out how to come after him. By then, whatever these people planned for him would be over. They would be able to use him, force him to do whatever they intended with the almanac, and then they wouldn’t need him.
“Have you figured out where you are yet?” Lilith asked.
“There’s nothing here.”
She rocked softly on her heels, looking at him. “Are you certain?”
Squeezing his eyes shut again, he focused once more. It seemed as if that was what she wanted of him, and he wasn’t going to deny himself the opportunity to detect whether there was something out there. He still couldn’t tell.
“Where am I?” he asked again.
She got to her feet and frowned at him. “I had higher hopes for you considering the power I detected.”
Stepping away, she made a motion with her hand, and the two men lifted Sam off the chair he’d been sitting on. The paint on the simple wooden chair had faded, and though it hadn’t been all that uncomfortable, it had the appearance of age—and unsteadiness. They dragged him forward.
Sam tried to struggle. He pulled on the power in the vrandal, but there wasn’t enough energy in him. The pulsing began, but he’d come to realize that it didn’t help all that much. The only thing that did was when he was able to call upon the power from within himself, but he didn’t control that.
There was a door he hadn’t seen before. It blended into the wall, and when the woman opened it, Sam braced for what was on the other side.
They dragged him and threw him into the room. Sam scrambled to his feet, spinning to face them, but they closed the door and cast him into darkness.
However, he had the vrandal, which he could use to generate just enough faint light to see by.
Sam looked around. The room was as empty as the one on the other side. Only this one didn’t even have a chair. It was a prison cell. Turning slowly in place, he looked for the door, but the walls had all blended, making it difficult for him to discern.
He was trapped. Alone.
His thoughts turned to Tara.
Sam didn’t know how long he had been trapped here, but it was likely long enough that she would know he was missing. She would know that he wouldn’t have abandoned her.
But how hard could she search for him?
Without leaving the Academy, and he doubted that she would be allowed to do so, there wouldn’t be anything she could do to find him.
Would Havash send others after him?
Why, though? Sam wasn’t truly a member of the Academy. If there was anyone who knew the truth of that, it was Havash.
With the Nighlan attacking the city, there was too much of a threat to risk going after Sam. Havash might simply think that he had abandoned the Academy.
And he didn’t know.
There was something along the far wall. He approached it cautiously and frowned.
The almanac.
Why would they have left him in a room with the almanac?
Sam took a seat, pulling the almanac onto his lap. He flipped open the cover before hesitating. He didn’t know why they had him here or what they wanted of him. Anything he might do or say could be watched. If he used the power of the vrandal and revealed the writing in the almanac, it was possible there would be someone observing him to use what he discovered. They had kept it safe from Ben and Ferand, from Bethal, and now he would lose it to the Nighlan after all?
He closed the almanac.
Sam cradled it, running his fingers along the cover. The leather was soft and smooth, and there was something comforting about the almanac in general. He had gone through the almanac extensively, learning the various different patterns that were there, the way that he described accessing the arcane arts, but trapped as he was, there wasn’t anything that he could do for himself. Sam had tried to use the vrandal to create angulation, but his control over it was poor at best, and he hadn’t been able to do anything.
His mind worked through the series of symbols on the pages, and though he had already started to interpret what he read without using the vrandal, it was easier to do so with it. Sam could pull apart the knowledge within the book, but drawing on that knowledge, and using it in some way, was impossible for him.
Without anything else to do, he read through the almanac. Sam might as well use the time that he had.
Sam paused on one page and rested his arms in front of it, trying to block anyone from seeing what he was doing. He skimmed this page only because it didn’t start with the line about reaching into the source. That line had been a part of every page Tara had started with, though she hadn’t known why. Neither had Sam. The arcane arts didn’t involve the source or anything quite like it. It was the power contained within the magical user. It came forth from within them, and they pushed it out, using angulation to concentrate and direct that power.
Only as he was reading through some of these pages there was nothing about angulation. He saw the source, and he saw descriptions of ways to push out the power, ways it needed to flow, but nothing more than that.
An irritant began to work at the back of his mind. He tried to ignore it, but it persisted, pestering sense that he couldn’t shake.
Friction.
His captors were preventing him from using the power of the vrandal. He could use it on the almanac but nowhere else, which meant they feared him being able to call power through it.
So much for saying they weren’t scared of a mere trinket.
The only ones he’d known with the ability to prevent the use of the vrandal were the Nighlan. Which meant that despite their denials, they were with the Nighlan.
Chapter Ten
Sam lost track of time. At one point, someone had come through the door and brought him a tray of food, and then they left out of another door. He marked both doors but couldn’t figure out how to open either. The only thing he could do was read through the almanac.
Drawing power through the vrandal to translate the pages wasn’t difficult, and it seemed to be the only thing they permitted him to do. He scanned each page for answers but still hadn’t found anything. The almanac remained a mystery to him—at least the parts where it didn’t describe reaching for the source.
He didn’t know how long he’d been held here, but he knew the Nighlan had been attacking Tavran before his capture. He had no idea what the Nighlan were doing, other than using the attacks as a distraction. They had slipped into the Academy despite the Academy masters defending the Academy itself.
Hopefully, his sister, his friends, and Tara, were all safe.
And hopefully, they were looking for him.
Sam couldn’t help but feel as if they had to be looking for him. If they knew that the Nighlan had taken him, wouldn’t they come?
That thought kept coming to him, but it was a thought that he didn’t have an answer for.
What was worse, when he did come up with an answer, it was never one that reassured him.
Havash was now the Grandam.
Havash knew the truth about him and his connection to the arcane arts.
Havash would know that he didn’t truly belong at the Academy.
A third door opened, and he looked up. How many doors were there? He suspected the room was built to be difficult to escape, but it was also seemingly designed to confound him. That much it had done.
Lilith stood in the doorway, making no effort to close the door behind her, which suggested that whatever was beyond the door would be
dangerous to him. That was if he could even reach whatever was behind her. “How have you been resting?”
“I’ve been resting fine.” He shifted. There wasn’t anything for him to sit on except the hard ground, which made things even more uncomfortable. Probably part of the plan, to make it so that he was miserable. Then they could find a way to break him.
“You haven’t thanked me yet,” she said.
“For what?”
“For recovering what you lost.”
Sam looked down at the almanac in his lap, and his arms draped over the closed cover. “You want me to thank you for recovering the almanac you tried to steal from me?”
She raised an eyebrow at him. “Did we?”
Sam said nothing. Perhaps he had dropped the almanac in the city. The longer that he was here, the more that he waited for the torment to begin. These were the Nighlan. He had seen the links they had gone through to attack, and he knew that he was not safe here. At some point, they would attack him.
At some point, they would kill him. He was not useful to them, and when that became apparent, they would get rid of him. Maybe they were waiting for him to use the key on the almanac. That was how he had to hold out.
“How long do you intend to keep me here?”
“As long as necessary.”
He sat up. “Necessary for what?” he asked carefully.
“For answers.”
Answers? They wanted to know how to get into the city, but they had already accomplished that. Breaking into the Academy had proved it.
Sam shifted again. He was going to have to stand and pace once she left the room.
“What answers do you need? You haven’t been asking any questions,” he said.
“Do you really believe that?”
Sam glanced down at the almanac. Could they have been using him? He had been concerned about that from the beginning. “What do you want with me?”
Lilith stopped in front of him. The sense of friction that he had whenever she was around persisted, mostly in how she watched him.
“There are many things I want from you. For now, I want you to get up.”
“Up?”
She nodded, and Sam slowly rose to his feet. He clutched the almanac to his chest, squeezing it against him. Lilith studied him for a moment before smiling at him.
“Where are you taking me?” he asked.
She sniffed, turned from him, and started toward yet a different door than she’d taken to enter the strange room. The door opened—again with the sense of friction against him—and he prepared for whatever she might do once they left.
Sam followed her, remaining on edge. All the different things he’d read in the almanac flashed through his mind. Everything involved the arcane arts, something he could not utilize. If only he could get the vrandal to hold onto that line of green power, then Sam might be able to turn it into angulation that would be effective in protecting himself. Still, any time that he had attempted to do so, that power had started to flow, but then it had sputtered when he had tried to turn it. The alchemy within the vrandal was not meant for angulation.
Lilith paused at the end of a small hall. She glanced over to him before pressing her hand against one of the stones in the wall. There was something about it that reminded him of the inside of the Academy and the hidden hallways. She triggered a doorway, and he frowned.
Could he have been in the Academy all this time?
That didn’t seem likely. He would have known if he had been in the Academy from the sense of arcane arts around him. This was somewhere else, though the building was similar.
She led him down another hall, this one longer. A single lantern along the entire length of the corridor provided the only light. Sam maintained his connection to the vrandal, though he doubted he could do anything with it. Lilith made certain of that.
He saw no guards, none of the others he’d seen before. Why wouldn’t they have any guards here? Did they really view him as so little of a threat?
Sam followed Lilith until she reached a staircase. When she started up, he hesitated, only for a moment.
He had the almanac. He had his vrandal. All it would take would be for him to make a run. Lilith was a few stairs above him.
Taking a deep breath, he turned…
And slammed into an invisible force.
Sam bounced off, falling to the ground. He got to his feet, rubbing his forehead where he’d struck the powerful barrier. Holding out his hand, he ran it around the outside of what he detected as the barrier, which felt different than those within the Academy. He could feel the soft pressure against the vrandal, and when he tried to use the vrandal to move past it, there was an increase in the resistance. He had to find some way to push through it.
Lilith’s footsteps were moving away. He couldn’t head down.
What about back the way he’d been? Sam turned and darted toward the hall.
And struck another barrier.
Lilith was forming them as she went. That had to be the friction he felt. The sense of it was there now, building up along his arms, his skin, leaving him almost raw.
It left him with little choice other than to follow her.
He started up the stairs. When he caught up to Lilith, she cast a look in his direction that he couldn’t read, but one that appeared almost amused at his attempts to escape.
He held the almanac against his chest as the vrandal pulsed in his hand. He wanted to release the power within it because of the discomfort that left his hand feeling as if something was radiating along it and working up to his shoulder, then beyond and down into his body. Not a pleasant sense.
She was using some power against him. He was certain of it. He couldn’t see it when she did it, though. That bothered him. Either she knew some way of hiding it from him, or she had a kind of power that he couldn’t fully access. Either way, it worried—and bothered—him.
He focused on the vrandal, trying to be ready. If he had to, he thought that he might be able to let some of that power explode from him into Lilith, but he would have to be prepared to run when he did. He would have to know where to run.
They reached a landing, and she turned down it and walked into a wide hall. A door near the end was open, and daylight spilled through. As they neared, Sam realized the door was on the main level of whatever building they were in.
His heart hammered. In his desire to escape from Lilith, he had attempted to run down. That would have been a mistake. Where would it have led him? She guided him toward the door, still saying nothing.
They stopped at the entrance. There was something about this place that struck him as similar to the Academy. The tower, the way the walls could open by triggering silent mechanisms, the scent of the air.
He searched his mind for what he had read in the library, trying to come up with an answer about the different types of buildings that would be similar to the Academy and similar to the kind of power he detected there, but nothing came to mind. The reason for that was easy for him to come up with, though. Sam had been more concerned about things like angulation, mathematics, botany and had not had all spent time thinking about the construction of the Academy itself.
“Where are we?” he asked.
A slight smile curved the corners of her mouth. “I would have expected you to know.”
Sam reached the open doorway and looked outside. A path led from the door and through towering pine trees. Their scent clung to the air, but that wasn’t the only thing he smelled. He detected another odor, but he didn’t know what to make of it. Something familiar, at least as far as he could tell. The darkened sky flickered as if storm clouds simmered in the distance.
He looked over at Lilith. The scent reminded him of her. When she’d first appeared, he had smelled the strange spice to her. There had been something exotic about it, but something familiar too. He’d known that scent. Now that he stood in the doorway, feeling the gentle breeze and the hint of energy upon it that spoke of rain, he couldn’
t quite place where he was.
“Why should I know this? You took me away from the Academy, and now hold me in prison, and expect me to know where you brought me?”
“How long have you been there?”
Sam frowned at the change in topic.
“A few months.”
She squeezed her eyes shut, shaking her head for a moment before opening them once again. “Only a few months?” This seemed more to herself and less to Sam, but he couldn’t help but note what sounded like a measure of disappointment to her words. Was she upset with him?
“I am a first-year student. I presume you understand what that means in the Academy.”
If she was going to dig for information, then he could do the same.
She regarded him. “You are too old to be a first-year student.”
“I came to the Academy late,” he said.
“Then you have little potential.”
It felt like a slap, but she wasn’t wrong. “I have less potential than some with the arcane arts,” Sam said, trying to pick his words carefully, “but that doesn’t mean that I have no potential. I did make it to the Academy, after all.”
What was he doing here? Why was he trying to prove himself to her?
Stubbornness, that had to be it.
That, and the fact that he didn’t care for somebody outside of the Academy questioning him. She didn’t belong in the Academy—though neither did he.
“When did you acquire the vrandal?”
Sam looked down at his hand. “It has been a month or so,” he said. Longer than that, probably. “We stopped…” He had almost said that he had stopped the Nighlan from attacking.
That would’ve been a mistake, especially with her.
She turned back to him, watching him, an expectant look in her eyes.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said to her. “Are you going to tell me why you have me here?”
“Are you going to tell me why you came to the Academy so late?”
Did it matter if he told her the truth?
Alchemist Illusion (The Alchemist Book 3) Page 10