EPIC: Fourteen Books of Fantasy (129 page)

“But that’s so unfair.” Gala looked at Esther and Maya in dismay. “People are hungry. They can die from that, right?”

Maya gave her a strange look. “Yes, people can definitely die from hunger—which is something all sorcerers need to realize.”
 

Gala blinked, taken aback. Was Maya lumping her in with the other sorcerers? It didn’t sound like she meant the word as a compliment, either.

Esther glared at Maya. “Stop it. You know the girl cares—she’s just been sheltered, that’s all.”

“More like born yesterday,” Maya muttered, and Esther purposefully stepped on her foot, eliciting an annoyed grunt from the other woman.

“In any case, child,” Esther said, addressing Gala this time, “Blaise has a plan when it comes to getting his crops to the other territories. He’s letting us trade the seeds in exchange for other necessities. He knows these seeds will take and will provide others with good crops just like our own, since the improvements he made are hereditary.”
 

Leaving the dying wheat field behind them, they finally reached the inn where Blaise told them to stay. Before they went in, Maya made Gala cover her head with a thick woolen shawl. “So we don’t get attacked by some amorous ruffians at night,” she explained. “The fewer people who know a pretty girl is staying here, the safer it’ll be for us.”
 

The brown inn building was small and rundown, just like the houses they’d passed on the way. It was difficult to believe it could house more than a dozen travelers. Their room upstairs was dirty, cramped, hot, and disgusting—at least according to Maya. According to Esther, they were also being robbed blind.
 

Gala didn’t care; she was just excited to be some place new. When they went downstairs for dinner, she asked the innkeeper about the local attractions, being careful to keep the shawl wrapped around her head.

“Oh, you’re lucky,” the burly man told her. “Later this week, we have games at the Coliseum. You’ve heard of our Coliseum, right?”

Gala nodded, not wanting to seem ignorant. In the last couple of days, she’d learned it was best not to ask strangers any questions that could be posed to Maya and Esther instead.

He gave a satisfied grunt. “That’s what I thought. If you want to do something today, the market should still be open.” His eyes went to Maya’s large bosom, and he added, “Be sure to keep your money in hard-to-reach places. Lots of thieves around these days.”
 

“Thanks,” Maya said caustically, turning away from the innkeeper’s roving gaze. Esther huffed in disdain, shooting him a deadly glare before grabbing Gala’s arm and towing her away.

As soon as they were out of the innkeeper’s earshot, Esther turned to her and said firmly, “No.”

“No way,” Maya added, crossing her arms in front of her chest.

Gala stared at them in confusion. “But I didn’t ask the question yet—”

“Can we go to the Coliseum?” Esther said in a higher-pitched voice, mimicking Gala’s typically enthusiastic tones.

“Yes, can we, please?” Maya mocked, her imitation attempt even better than Esther’s.
 

Gala burst out laughing. She knew she should probably take offense, but she found the whole thing funny instead. The older women were watching her with stoic expressions on their faces, and she finally managed to stop laughing long enough to say, “Why don’t we talk about it tomorrow?”
 

“The answer is going to be the same tomorrow,” Esther said, giving Gala a narrow-eyed look.

Gala grinned at her, barely able to contain her excitement at the thought of the upcoming event. “Don’t worry about it, Esther—we’ll just wait and see. For now, let’s go to the market.”

And without waiting for their response, she walked out of the inn, going up the road to where she saw a cluster of buildings that typically signified a town center.

Chapter XXIX

Blaise

O
NCE
HIS
HOUSE
WAS
RESTORED
, Blaise found himself at loose ends, alternating between being furious with Augusta and worrying about Gala. By now, the Council undoubtedly knew about Gala, and they were probably taking measures to find her. Hopefully, Kelvin’s territory would be the last place they would look—assuming Gala did as he asked and kept a low profile.
 

Still, this was not a sustainable situation. Blaise had to do something to protect her in a more permanent way, and he had to do it soon, before those scared fools mobilized fully. The fact that Gala was not answering his Contact messages worried him a bit, although he guessed that she was not fully in control of her magical abilities yet—something he found mildly reassuring, since it minimized her chances of exposing herself to the world. Nonetheless, he missed her with an intensity he found deeply unsettling. It was as if a bright light had left his life when he dropped her off at the village.
 

A persistent idea kept nagging at the back of his mind—that of mastering the route to the Spell Realm. It was possible he was obsessing about it as a way to keep his thoughts occupied, he admitted to himself. In a way, that’s what he had done after Louie’s death: he’d focused on his work—on creating the intelligent object that turned out to be Gala—in order to keep himself busy. At the same time, however, he suspected that understanding the Spell Realm better could lead to unimaginable advances in sorcery, potentially enabling him to become powerful enough to protect Gala from the entire Council.
 

Tired of thinking about it, he began planning. Although Augusta had burned many of his notes, Blaise didn’t feel particularly discouraged. He had frequently used Life Captures over the past year to record many of his particularly useful experiments, and he still had a lot of those droplets. More importantly, however, it seemed as if his mind had been working on the problem of getting to the Spell Realm ever since Gala had first described it to him, and he had some ideas he wanted to try out.

It was time for action.

He decided to start with a small, inanimate object. If he succeeded in sending that to the Spell Realm and having it come back, it would be an important step toward sending an actual person there.

Thus motivated, Blaise headed to his study, eager to take on a new challenge.

The spells were finally ready.

Blaise had chosen a needle as the object he would send to the Spell Realm. The spell would examine the needle at its deepest level and break it into its most elemental parts. That would destroy the physical needle, causing it to disappear, but those parts would become information, a message that would go to the Spell Realm and come back to change something in the Physical Realm, like all spells did. In this particular case, however, if Blaise succeeded, the manifestation in the Physical Realm should be identical to the original object.
 

Cognizant of the danger of new, untested spells and not wishing to suffer his mother’s fate, Blaise took precautions. He used the same spell that had protected him during Augusta’s attack—the spell that wrapped him in a shimmering bubble. The protection it granted would not last long, but it should be long enough to shield him from whatever havoc the experiment might cause.
 

Taking a slow, calming breath, he loaded the cards into his Interpreter Stone and watched the needle disappear, as it was supposed to.
 

Then he waited.

At first nothing happened. He could see the familiar shimmer of the protection spell, but there was no sign of the needle coming back. Frustrated, Blaise tried to figure out if he had made a mistake. The coming-back part of the spell was the trickiest. He assumed the needle would come back to its original location, but the spot remained empty.

All of a sudden, he heard a loud noise downstairs. It seemed to be coming from the storage room.
 

Blaise ran there, nearly tripping on the stairs in excitement.
 

And when he entered the room, he froze, staring at the sight in front of him in disbelief.
 

The needle had come back . . . in a way. It had returned not to the spot where it lay in his lab, but to the box where he had kept it originally. This return location actually made some sense, unlike the object he was staring at.

Among the shattered pieces of the box and scattered needles on the floor, he saw what he assumed was the original needle—except that now it was more like a sword. A strange, thick sword made of some kind of crystalline material that emitted a faint green glow. Instead of a hilt, this particular sword had a hole at the top.
 

Blaise carefully picked up the thing that used to be the needle, putting his hand through the hole at the top. It was actually comfortable to hold that way. Despite its size, the sword-like object was impossibly light, no heavier than the original needle. Lifting it, Blaise tried swinging it around the room and discovered that it was both sharp and strong. He was able to cut through his old sofa with ridiculous ease, and the sword-needle didn’t break when he banged it on the stone floor.

Both amused and discouraged, Blaise decided to place the needle as a decoration in his hall downstairs. It would work well with the new furniture he had gotten after the fire, as well as some other trinkets he had on display there.
 

Heading back to his study, Blaise wondered what he had actually learned from this. On the one hand, he’d been able to do something to the needle—something that had obviously involved the Spell Realm. However, the needle had not come back as the same object. It had changed quite drastically. Would the same thing happen if a person went there? Would the person come back as some kind of a monstrosity, assuming he even survived the spell?
 

It seemed obvious Blaise had made an error in the spell. He had more work to do.

Chapter XXX

Augusta

“A
UGUSTA
,
THIS
IS
C
OLIN
. H
E
is a blacksmith’s apprentice from Blaise’s territory,” Ganir told her, gesturing toward the young man standing in the middle of the room. The man was a peasant; it was obvious both from his appearance and from the deferential way he held himself.

Augusta raised her eyebrows in surprise. What was this commoner doing in Ganir’s chambers? When the Council Leader summoned her this morning, she had gone eagerly, knowing he likely had news about Blaise’s creation.
 

“Tell her what you told me,” said Ganir to the young man. As usual, the Council Leader was sitting behind his desk, observing everything with his sharp gaze.
 

“I was dancing with her, as I told his lordship,” the man said obediently, staring at Augusta with awe and admiration. “Then she just disappeared.”

“The ‘she’ in question sounds like the one we’re looking for,” Ganir told Augusta. “Physically, she’s just as you described—blond, blue-eyed, and quite beautiful. Isn’t that right, Colin?”

The peasant nodded. “Oh yes, quite beautiful.” There was something about how he said the last word that rubbed Augusta the wrong way—aside from the fact that he apparently lusted after the creature.
 

Augusta’s eyes narrowed. As she had suspected, Blaise had lied about the creature being unstable in the Physical Realm. “Explain what you meant by ‘disappeared’,” she ordered, looking at the commoner.

“One moment she was backing away,” the man said uncertainly, as though embarrassed about something, “then she made me feel awful, and then she was not standing where she was.” His face flushed unbecomingly.
 

“Tell Augusta exactly what happened,” Ganir commanded, a slightly cruel smile appearing on his face.

“She didn’t want to dance with me, and I was trying to get close to her,” Colin admitted, his face reddening further.

“And what happened next?” Ganir prompted. “If I am forced to repeat this question one more time, you might visit the dungeon of this Tower.”

The peasant paled at the threat. “I soiled myself, my lady,” he admitted, looking like he wanted to disappear through the floor. “She made me feel scared and confused at the same time, and all my muscles involuntarily relaxed. And she just vanished, like she wasn’t even there.”

Augusta wrinkled her nose in disgust.
Peasants.
 

“You are free to go, Colin,” Ganir said, finally taking pity on the man. “When you come out, send in the clown.”

Still visibly embarrassed, the peasant hurried out of the room.

“So it is definitely a
she
,” Ganir said thoughtfully once they were alone again.

“It is an
it
.” Augusta didn’t like where Ganir was going with this. “We already knew that it had assumed a feminine shape.”

“It’s one thing to have a feminine shape,” the old sorcerer said, a curious expression appearing on his face, “but it’s quite different when that shape is one that young men want to dance with. And it’s yet another thing altogether when the shape starts acting like a girl and refusing some idiot’s attentions.”