Chapter 212 - Book of Secrets

Siobhan

Month 8, Day 21, Saturday 8:15 a.m.

Siobhan felt the moment when they escaped whatever method the Red Guard had been using to track her from the maze. As the strain on her divination-diverting ward fell to the normal low-level prickle and coldness of working against her dowsing artifact, her shoulders relaxed and her jaw unclenched. “We are clear,” she announced, triggering a simultaneous sigh of relief from everyone else in the small boat.

Beside her, Gera looked up from where she had seemed to be staring pensively into the water despite her lack of actual sight. “Did that meeting…go as you planned? I am uncertain if my presence was actually useful. Your designs run so deep, I feared to disrupt them by acting in some way that might go against your hidden purpose.”

“Your presence served its purpose,” Siobhan said. “If you had needed to interfere more directly, it would have been a consequence of the situation going wrong.”

Gera stared somewhere to the right of Siobhan’s arm. “But is this…truly enough to pay my debt? This does not feel equal in weight with what you did for me.”

“You also helped me managed the aftermath of the High Crown’s anger and fulfill the boons I promised, as well as fencing some items and procuring several false identities for me, remember? In fact, it is I who owe you. The spell I promised you, the one to handle Millennium’s sleep issues even once his power grows, and without hiring sorcerers to guard his sleep through the night, is ready.” Siobhan listed the basics that Gera would need to prepare before they could cast the sleep-proxy spell. “When you are ready, I will visit with the spell instructions and guide them through a first casting.”

Gera bowed deeply. “Words cannot express my gratitude.”

“It is an equal exchange. There is no need to be grateful.”

“An exchange that you gave me the opportunity for. There are many others that would have jumped at the chance to barter with you. And…if I might be so bold, I wonder if there is any other task you might set me to? I have a favor to ask of you, my lady.”

Siobhan raised an eyebrow. “Oh? What is it?”

“Would you be willing to teach me the spell you used with Millennium? The one in which you place your hands over his chest and hum? I appreciate your offer to teach him directly someday, it’s only that I am his mother, and I would like to be able to comfort him in the meantime.” The muscles around Gera’s eyes and mouth tightened, creasing her skin with faint wrinkles. “I—I feel that I’ve been so useless in that aspect. Never able to fix things for him.”

Siobhan’s stomach clenched. Would Ennis have made a request like that for her? Had he ever noticed her, thought about her, enough to know when she was struggling silently? Several different responses sprang to the tip of her tongue, but Siobhan suppressed them all, and eventually only said, “I would be willing to teach you that spell. It is not difficult, though you must be careful with it. One might be enticed to use it during the times of greatest distress—times when a mistake can be most fatal,” Siobhan said meaningfully.

Despite the heat, the hair on Gera’s arms rose visibly. “I take your meaning, my lady. And in exchange?”

Siobhan hummed thoughtfully, then waved Gera to join her at the back of the boat, where she spoke in a low voice. “There is something that I have found troublesome lately. But I do not want to potentially endanger your life or sanity by exposing you to it. I want to gather information about something that deals with the realms of dreams, consciousness, and memory. I wonder, perhaps there are more abstract forms of divination that might be able to give me information about the seal containing something without actually touching the thing trapped inside? Is there a way to…place blinders on yourself, metaphorically? Nothing to do with dream-walking. I think that might be…hazardous.”

Gera had gone distinctly pale and was crumpling the fabric of her skirt with both fists.

“I would not require you to perform this divination,” Siobhan hurried to assure her. “For such a small favor of my knowledge, I only wanted your expertise on the subject.”

Gera relaxed only slightly, looked around, and then leaned closer to Siobhan to whisper. “Is this about the request the Red Guard made of you?”

Siobhan nodded, though considering it a “request” was generous.

If anything, Gera grew even more tense. Siobhan could almost hear the woman’s muscles creaking against each other like old bone, she was so stiff. “Prying into things that should not be known is one of the most common ways for a diviner to die. One of the first things we learn is that we should allow null answers as outputs to all of our spells, and that if we receive one, we should stop. I would suggest some preemptive divinations about the danger of prying further into this ‘seal,’ if even that can be done without accidentally accessing whatever is within. I know you are incredibly powerful, my lady, and this research seems to lie within your domains of sovereignty, but I caution against trying to do this investigation yourself, if it is truly so dangerous. I…could put some feelers out for skilled diviners who are, for whatever reason, desperate enough to risk their lives in exchange for a boon from you.”

Siobhan sighed and waved away the offer. “The situation is not so dire yet. I will consider other, less risky favors that you could do for me.”

Gera straightened and smoothed down the section of her skirt that she had wrinkled, though she did not seem fully relieved.

Normally, Siobhan might have asked the woman for some restricted spell information, but as soon as she got access to the rest of the University’s restricted archive, that need might disappear. Perhaps she could have the woman sell a stolen Conduit or two on her behalf. Even though she had paid Liza for her latest work in knowledge rather than coin, Siobhan had been spending like a profligate mistress of the High Crown lately. Her stash was down to less than a thousand gold. These extravagant expenses were worth it for even a small increase in her safety, but it also suggested that her current funds would not last forever.

By the time she became Sebastien once more and returned to her attic apartment, she was feeling a bit of mental fatigue, if not exactly the profound exhaustion that she had once been so familiar with. She cast her dreamless sleep spell, used the vibrational calming spell to forcefully relax, and took a short nap to relieve the burden on the raven she was currently bound to.

When she woke, she was ready.

Rather than re-cast her shadow-familiar spell, Sebastien took out Myrddin’s journal, ran through a few exercises to limber her mind, and then passed the book’s test with only three attempts. Over the past week, she had transcribed the first thirty or so pages for Liza, which contained the three methods Myrddin had recorded to create self-charging artifacts. The task had been both slow and arduous, as trying to maintain her concentration on both glyph meanings while also understanding the contents of the page well enough to write them down on a separate sheet of paper was at the edge of her capabilities. And then, after every few pages, she would need to rest, recuperate, and then make the attempt at accessing the contents once more.

But when Liza had received the pages, the woman’s hands had trembled, and as they discussed the work to prepare for the meeting, her eyes had strayed toward them every time she thought Siobhan wasn’t looking.

Now, as Siobhan ran her forefinger over the thick paper, she wondered what else she might be able to get someone like Liza to do with the enticement of Myrddin’s knowledge. Gold could be earned anywhere. This particular knowledge was accessible through Siobhan alone, and with secrecy vows, would hopefully remain so for a while.

She only wished that she could gain from it, too, but even though she had transcribed Myrddin’s notes by hand, all she could say was that she vaguely understood the concepts of what he had created. The actual mechanics of his spellwork shot so far over her head she might as well have been a toddler. He used glyphs that A Comprehensive Compendium of Components had no reference, for interspersed with complex math, and notes in a truncated shorthand that made little sense, even when she recognized all the individual letters. That, and, since he was not writing this for others’ consumption, he often stopped halfway through a thought and made a logical leap either to the conclusion, or to another thought entirely.

Truly, an eccentric genius.

After the self-charging artifacts, Myrddin’s focus shifted, prefaced by a note.

It escapes me why everyone recommends brownies for household work. It’s one of the first things people suggest when they learn I’m a bachelor, right after they learn that I have no plans to marry or hire some pretty young girl to take care of the house and warm my bed. It’s ridiculous! Brownies are profoundly unreliable. This it the third time this month that mine has somehow become offended and decided to leave my shoes out in the rain, and that’s not even counting the time it “accidentally” vomited on my pillow and “forgot” to clean it up. Someone should come up with a more reasonable

The note cut off abruptly there, in favor of some detailed sketches of two foot tall, fully articulated humanoid mechanism made of metal. It was meant to be powered by a beast core, and follow what Siobhan guessed was a complex set of commands built into artifact wards that were—once again—so complex she couldn’t understand them.

‘Did Myrddin invent any potions? Surely I could understand that,’ she lamented. ‘Probably,’ she amended, noticing one sub spell-array that was only half built-out. Knowing her luck, Myrddin would feel that the number of stirs and how finely to grind his potion’s hellcat feathers was so obvious that he didn’t actually need to write it down.

The designs for his brownie-replacement continued for a few pages, but then Myrddin wrote some questions about how to define when certain actions should be taken based on other criteria, and the next dozen pages were nothing but incomprehensible, incredibly detailed spell arrays that seemed to be sub-arrays of other sub-arrays, all calling on each other in a hierarchical web. Even that much, she wouldn’t have understood, if Myrddin hadn’t drawn a mind-map to keep track of their connections.

At that point, her mind grew too strained and she lost control, allowing the book to snap back into incomprehensibility. Siobhan rubbed her temples as she let out a hissing breath. She closed Myrddin’s book and put it back in the warded chest, then took a stance in the center of the room and began light-refinement. This, too, had become even easier with practice. She completed nine full cycles of refinement, and when she was finished, let out a final deep breath that almost seemed to glow.

Covered in sweat, she felt as if she half floated down the back stairway, every cell in her body filled with a gentle, buoyant energy. She bought a big meal at one of the local restaurants, ate until she was stuffed, then ordered a second meal that they packed away in a lunch box. Then, she returned to her attic apartment and opened Myrddin’s journal again.

The reaction-array work cut off halfway through one page, and when Sebastien turned to the next, she found a map drawn out across both pages. This, she carefully copied down, because it could hold a clue as to when, exactly, Myrddin had written the journal.

Several more maps of various regions followed, with question marks around the edges where the known lands ended and the wilderness began. Those borders had changed in the thousand years since, and some of the countries didn’t even exist any more. Then, Myrddin had drawn what he knew of the planet, calculated the equator, and estimated the planet’s diameter.

Sebastien stared at that drawing for a long time. She had never realized how small a part of the planet the known lands were. Then, her eyes were drawn to the notes Myrddin had scribbled beside his rendition of the world.

Sixty to seventy percent water? I wonder if other continents exist. The Starpeak Mountains were probably formed from the unnaturally violent collision of two continents, but I can only guess what could have caused such a thing. Maybe the Cataclysm. My Will isn’t strong enough to do a planet-sized divination, even now. I wanted to bounce a light-based divination off of the moon, but I haven’t had any new epiphanies about how to make that work. I wonder if magic even extends out that far.

Sebastien stared at the last line until a headache bloomed through her skull and her concentration slipped. Then, instead of moving on to light-refinement to boost her recovery speed, she stared up at the sky through the ceiling window. ‘Why would Myrddin even suspect that magic doesn’t extend to the moon?’ It was a possibility so far outside of her understanding of reality that she would have never expected it.

‘Does magic…need air to exist?’ That seemed absurd. But Myrddin’s understanding of the cosmos had been advanced far beyond his time. And she knew his understanding of magic was the same. ‘Maybe magic doesn’t exist where there’s no life. If it’s some kind of byproduct of thought, or requires the common consciousness as a medium, then it might make sense that there would be none on the moon. Wow.’ A slow, giddy smile stretched across her face.

This was a hint at a profound secret. A tiny brick in the foundation of her goal of being the world’s most powerful sorcerer. She bounced up, laughing to herself as she began the first round of light-refinement in the beam through the window. After nine more rounds, her muscles were beginning to complain that she could only practice this particular magic so many times per day.

She had trouble getting past Myrddin’s protections this time, and ended up making seven or eight attempts as she ran into rare glyphs that she had not yet memorized. But the next part of his journal filled her with even more delight.

He was developing a personal flight spell. And not just any flight spell. One that would take the user into the stratosphere, providing both oxygen and insulation. And she could almost understand the beginning iterations, until he started adjusting it to create a semi-automated flight backpack that would adjust its output based on the surrounding conditions and the health status of its wearer.

Sebastien carefully copied down the actively cast version of the spell, even though she probably didn’t have the capacity to cast it even if she could unravel how it worked.

This took her to the end of her concentration once more, and after a final round of light-refinement from the setting sun, Sebastien forced herself to take another short nap before returning to the book once more.

After the flight spell, Myrddin had worked on a long-distance magnification spell that could outperform most telescopes, which he then modified with a divination spell that would filter out visual impurities caused by particles of dust, water, and other atmospheric pollutants.

Sebastien soothed her overworked and aching body with several salves and potions, completed all of her homework, and then practiced with the three things Professor Lacer had tasked her to transmute. By this point, she felt that she was approaching expertise. Transmuting diamond was the easiest, because it had such a uniform internal structure, but she still struggled to create even the tiniest speck using air as the component.

Her scab-root looked more edible than the naturally-grown samples, but it was equally disgusting, and no matter how she attempted to cook it, it left the lingering taste of soap and blood behind on her tongue and coated her teeth with a film she had to brush to remove.

The orb-weaver silk was somewhat easy to make, but often looked like it had been woven by a fat-fingered blind woman. She was trying to ensure she grew the threads evenly, wove the fabric consistently, and kept the color uniform. Silk was the most fun to play with, though, and she had given herself a side project to augment it.

Using the same methods, Sebastien could transmute filament-thin gold wire and weave it through the silk to create an even more conductive thread. She planned to practice until she could create tiny gold tubes, through which she could force a thinned-down mixture of magical beast blood and other conductive material. She theorized that it would end up being able to handle a lot more power than the current arrays that filled out her spell rod, while maintaining a small size and being relatively cheap to produce. ‘Maybe one day, I could even create a battle outfit full of spell arrays for active-casting rather than enchantment effects.’

Sebastien filled her Sunday with more attempts to get through Myrddin’s journal. He started off with a spell that worked together with the previous two, adding multiple images taken at slightly different angles together to create a coherent composite. He noted that it was useful to see details on the moon, even looking at it during the day.

After that, his focus jumped to a series of data and a long essay on the migratory patterns of birds. Apparently, birds had tiny magnets in a spot on their beak, which allowed them to sense where they were in relation to the planet’s own magnetic field.

This digressed into a study and dissection of a cockatrice, complete with detailed sketches. Myrddin noted:

I think the feathers are actually a mutation of the scales. Or the scales are unexpressed feathers, like a latent genetic trait. Proto-feathers? Did a dragon breed with a chicken? How, even? Genital-transformation magic?

I can’t believe I just wrote that. I wish it weren’t so plausible. It reminds me of that time Tharraxaron took an interest in me.

Sebastien snorted. The next dozen pages were filled with several drawings of sky-kraken and other sea-creature like beasts that Sebastien had never seen before.

That was all she managed to get through on Sunday, but she slept the night at her apartment and got in a final session early on Monday morning.

Myrddin’s next area of interest was again aligned with her own childhood fascination, though rather than trying to ride one of the sky-kraken, he desgined a wing-suit that would work with his previous backpack propulsion artifact. He stopped development on that halfway through, with another note:

Too uncomfortable for long periods of use. I’m old. I want to poop on a proper heated chamber pot.

And with that, Sebastien had accomplished all she could for the moment and was forced to hide away the book and hurry across most of the city to the University. The day started off normally, though Damien looked haggard and sallow when he murmured to her that he would have a report for her soon.

For once, it was she who made sure that he was eating enough during the cafeteria mealtimes. Even Alec noticed and tried to cheer Damien up by assuring him that there was no way he was going to fail the end of term exams with how hard he had been studying.

“Are you in some sort of competition with Sebastien?” Brinn asked.

“That’s exactly it,” Sebastien lied. “Because Professor Lacer still isn’t impressed enough to take Damien on as an apprentice, provisional or otherwise.”

Damien nodded, his mouth pinched as if he had bitten into an unripe persimmon.

Despite that, the day was relatively normal until they arrived at the Practical Casting classroom. Professor Lacer was often a few minutes late, but this time, he hadn’t arrived even after half an hour.

Tanya Canelo went to the administrative office and returned with a note that he was taking a personal day. As casting without supervision was considered too dangerous—especially this close to the end of term when students were most likely to be both exhausted and desperate, she made the executive decision to release the class early, amidst rumors and gossip about where Professor Lacer could be.

“An Aberrant,” Damien muttered bleakly. “He probably got called away to deal with the aftermath of some poor sod breaking like a piece of crystal. Dashed upon the ground and ruined. All the beauty and potential of a life, wasted.”

Ana raised both eyebrows, sharing a glance with Sebastien over Damien’s head. “Damien, do you remember that time you started memorizing sad poetry, and then tried to run away from home?”

Damien blinked. “I was twelve. I didn’t pack an umbrella, and I got rained on, and—”

Sebastien flinched, her back tightening as the warding disks under her skin activated. Both Ana and Damien looked to her, and she tried to settle her expression into a nonchalant grimace. Almost as soon as the divination had started, it faded again. “Muscle spasm,” she explained.

She tried her best to pay attention as Ana subtly tried to dig into Damien’s dark mood and encourage him, but then another weak pulse of divination washed over her. As Ana was in the middle of convincing Damien to go out to the latest comedy play, Sebastien “suddenly remembered” that she had a book to return to the library and scurried away to the abandoned second floor classroom to set up her reverse-scrying spell and wait for another pulse.

She caught it as soon as it appeared, tracing it back to the same building her dormitory was in. A little closer detail revealed it was another of the first-floor dormitories, and that was all she needed to take down her reverse-scrying spell and storm out of the Citadel.

If she had been wearing something Professor Lacer’s climate-controlled long coat, it would have flared out behind her as she threw herself through the dormitory doorway and scanned for whoever was scrying for her.

She found them almost immediately.

A group of girls sat in a circle around a divination spell array. Its components were a daisy, a very accurate, if slightly too handsome, drawing of Sebastien, and a fountain pen that looked suspiciously like the one Sebastien had recently lost.

One of the girls looked up at her and paled. Soon after, the rest noticed her, which set off a dramatic scene full of shrieking and flailing as they tried to hide the drawing, smudge out their spellwork, and physically block her line of sight with their bodies.

But Sebastien had already seen it all. She ran through her mental image of the memory to parse the shape of the glyphs and the written instruction around the outside.

‘I’m the focus, obviously, but the divination wasn’t to find me. It was to reveal if I had any…desire? Oh. It was to reveal if I had any romantic interest in whoever was doing the casting. Were they taking turns?’

Sebastien stalked forward, ripped the drawing of herself out from under the leg of the girl who had tried to hide it by sitting on it.

She held it over the flame of the scented pink candle they were using for power. As the drawing curled away into blackened soot, she stared them all down. “Let me answer the question you were all so desperate to know that you decided to invade my privacy and steal from me. No, I do not.”

One of the girls flinched as if she had been slapped, most couldn’t meet her gaze, and big tears rolled down the cheeks of the girl closest to Sebastien’s feet.

If Sebastien were her father, she probably would have spat on the ground to show her displeasure, but she had always found that disgusting, and beside that didn’t trust what someone might do with her saliva. “Do not do this again,” she bit out.

Then she took her fountain pen back and left.

She found her Crown-family friends in her own dorm room, all gathered around Alec’s bed.

Ana immediately narrowed her eyes and stood up when she saw Sebastien’s stormy expression. “What’s wrong?

Sebastien explained the situation, though she made up a random student that had tipped her off to the situation to cover up how she had actually learned what was happening and where. She had expected sympathy, but instead, both Damien and Alec turned as red as tomatoes before spluttering out laughter.

They guffawed so hard they fell off the bed, and Alec started drooling on the floor, open-mouthed and struggling to breathe. If she hadn’t known better, she would have thought he was sobbing in horrible pain.

Ana coughed several times, until that, too, devolved into laughter, and then all was lost.

Rhett and Waverly hugged each other for support, while the tiny girl slapped Rhett’s arm over and over as if trying to smack the amusement out of him.

Brinn was the only one who managed to keep it to a few chuckles, and he patted Sebastien’s back sympathetically.

Alec crawled his way back onto his bed and wiped the tears from his cheeks. “I peed myself, just a little.”

Sebastien grimaced at him with disgust.

Ana coughed again, then tucked her hair behind her ears and lifted her chin like she had never found anything funny at all. “Those girls are taking this too far. Writing stories and drawing pictures was one thing, but at this rate, someone will be trying to slip you a love potion.”

That sobered Damien, at least. He lifted his head from where it had been resting on his knees in a recovery position. “Anyone who was discovered doing such a thing would be arrested for blood magic! Love potions tamper with a person’s free will.”

Ana stared at him, blank-faced, Rhett chuckled, and Waverly rolled her eyes.

Damien sighed. “Okay, so stupid people will do stupid things. And most people are a little bit evil when it suits them and they think they can get away with it. I’m learning this. But surely they wouldn’t be able to find a recipe?”

Ana rubbed her temples. “Maybe not. But that might not stop them from trying. And if they botch some illegal concoction and end up poisoning Sebastien instead, does that make it better?” Before anyone could respond, she huffed, pulled her hair around so that it hung artfully over one shoulder, and nodded at them like a general giving the order for battle. “I will handle this. I’ll need to pull in Tanya Canelo and a few others.”

She took a single step, then hesitated, turning to Sebastien. “If that’s alright?”

Sebastien buried her head in her hands. “Yes. Stop them. Thank you.”

Alec lounged back on his bed as he watched Ana leave, then turned to Sebastien. A mischievous grin grew across his face. “So we now know those girls have no chance with you. But you’re still an eligible bachelor. If you were to pick the most desirable romantic partner, who would it be, Sebastien? Do you have a type? Someone you like?”

Sebastien rolled her eyes. “I’m not interested in romance. I’m going to become a free-caster, and an Archmage. That’s much more enticing than any foolish dalliance.”

Alec waved away her words as if they were buzzing gnats, then leaned forward conspiratorially. “But if you had to pick, who would it be?”

Rhett shook his head sadly. “I think a better question would be to ask Sebastien if he remembers anyone’s name. That’s a more realistic stepping stone for our emotionally-stunted friend.”

“Just hypothetically,” Alec urged. “What makes a desirable partner?”

Seeing that Alec wouldn’t stop until she gave him something, Sebastien thought for a moment. “Well, probably someone intelligent, and driven, who you could have interesting conversations with. And maybe a bit older, so they would have matured beyond the emotional level of a child,” she added with a sneer.

Only then did she notice that several of their dorm mates were obviously listening in on the conversation from the walkway and nearby cubicles.

A young man called out, “It’s Professor Lacer!” from behind the cover of a cubicle wall, and several of the eavesdroppers let out gasps and muffled giggles. At least they had the good sense to scurry away before Sebastien could burn them alive with her gaze alone.

Alec clapped a hand to his mouth, wide-eyed. “Professor Lacer?” he asked in a stage whisper.

Sebastien took a deep breath and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Thaddeus Lacer is too old for any of us, and having a relationship with a Professor is against the University’s ethical rules.”

The whole group stared at her, and Waverly hadn’t even tuned out the conversation to start reading a book.

Alec’s grin grew larger. “But if it wasn’t against the rules?”

Sebastien pointed at him threateningly, as if her finger were a battle wand. “I am not romantically interested in Professor Lacer. And he would never consider such a thing, either. He’s a professional, and I’m sure he has standards. I’m just saying, if you had to pick someone, someone like him would be better than those girls. Hells, even my nemesis Nunchkin would be better!”

Damien coughed awkwardly and, thank the stars above, changed the subject.

Author Note:

A couple of things today!

• I spent my 1 week vacation busily working on this book, and while I didn't actually increase my buffer of completed chapters (yet) I did a lot of the pre-work and figured out the details that will make it much easier to simply write them.

• My assistant is looking for some good content for social media, and he posted a thread on the Alcove asking for reader feedback. If you have ideas about your favorite chapter, best funny or awesome moments, good one-liners, etc, please help him out (and by extension, me) by sharing your thoughts. Also it's fun to read other people's favorite moments. Go here: https://alcove.azaleaellis.com/t/post-your-favorite-quotes-scenes/375/5

• A Foreboding of Woe's audiobook is live on AzaleaEllisBooks. It's also available (along with all other PGTS content, a total of 105 hours) on my Patreon at the $25 level.