The Spell Realm (18 page)

The old man paused, and Blaise saw that the children were looking at the old man in wide-eyed fascination—and so was Gala.

"That’s not what I read,” she told the old man, looking puzzled. “And what I read sounded much more plausible.”

Blaise smiled at her confusion. “Gala, these are just old stories . . . legends. They are not meant to be taken literally.”

The elderly storyteller frowned at Blaise. “What do you mean by that, sorcerer? These are the stories passed down for generations. Do you have some other explanation for how we came to be?”

“Well, yes, actually,” Blaise said slowly. He didn’t want to offend these people and their beliefs, so he needed to proceed carefully. “We don’t have all the answers, but we know a couple of things for sure. The world is very old. A thousand years is but a moment compared to its true age. In fact, there are trees that are older than that—you can tell their age from the number of rings inside their trunks. Sorcerers studying weather patterns have found a couple of pine trees that are over five thousand years old.”

The old man stared at him in shock, and some of the children giggled, enjoying the adults’ disagreement. “Over five thousand years?” one little boy asked, his eyes round with wonder. “That’s a long time for a tree to be alive.”

“Indeed,” Blaise said, smiling at the child. “But that’s not the only proof of our land’s true age. There are stalactites in the caverns of these very mountains that grow at a rate of about four inches every thousand years. Given how long some of them are, they must’ve been growing for hundreds of thousands of years. And, of course, there are the mountains themselves. The canyon that’s nearby has been formed by erosion from water and the other elements—a process that has most likely taken millions, not thousands, of years.”

The elderly man still looked skeptical. “If that’s true,” he said, “then where did Koldun and all of us come from? How did we come to be?”

“That’s a good question, and one that wise men have been pondering for ages,” Blaise said. “One theory right now is that nature shaped people, not unlike how people bred wolfhounds and shepherd dogs from the primordial wolf.”

He was about to continue his explanation when a loud boom shook the ground. At the same time, the sky lit up with a blazing white-and-purple light before going dark again.

Everybody froze, and one of the younger children began to cry. Only Gala looked more curious than alarmed.

“Was that thunder?” Blaise asked, looking at the frightened faces around the fire. “I’ve never heard it be so loud.”

The old man rose to his feet, his hands trembling. “Yes, sorcerer, that was thunder. It sounds like a storm is heading our way.”

Chapter 26: Augusta

Once she stopped shaking from the aftereffects of her battle with Ganir and the debilitating fear left her mind, Augusta began considering the consequences of what she’d done.

Ganir’s limp body was lying on the floor. She knelt beside it and pressed her fingers against his neck to feel his pulse. It was there, still going strong. The Council Leader was alive, but his mind was deep in a coma, just as she had intended. Of course, she hadn’t planned to use this particular spell on Ganir, but she was glad she’d had the cards on her. The spell had saved her life. And now that she knew it worked on people as well, she would definitely need to prepare new cards before leaving Turingrad.

Now that she had rendered the old man unconscious, Augusta wasn’t sure what to do with him. Ideally she should kill him, but the thought of snuffing out another sorcerer’s life was repugnant to her. Despite their differences, she’d always respected Ganir’s abilities, and the idea of killing him in cold blood bothered her.

She couldn’t let the others find him, though. They would immediately suspect sorcery, and since Augusta’s differences with Ganir were public knowledge, that would not bode well for her. Even though she knew she was in the right on this, she had no doubt there would still be a trial—a trial that could delay the upcoming mission to destroy Blaise’s creation.

No, she couldn’t let that happen. Ganir needed to disappear.

After pondering the problem for a minute, Augusta began working on a complex and highly risky spell. There was a chance that it could kill Ganir, but that was better than murdering him outright.

When the spell was done, she loaded the cards and watched the old sorcerer’s body disappear. If her calculations were correct, it would reappear in Ganir’s mansion in his territory, far away from Turingrad. She knew the location because Ganir had hosted a party there several years ago, and she and Blaise had been invited. Of course, if Ganir had changed anything in that room of his house—or if she had miscalculated even a tiny bit—he could easily end up dead. She didn’t feel too guilty about that, though, not when he had been planning to kill her with that fear spell of his.

Taking one last look around the empty roof, Augusta opened the door leading to the rooftop and began to climb down the winding staircase. She needed to make her way back to Ganir’s study, and she wasn’t about to risk teleportation again.

Walking through the hallways, she made sure that no one saw her as she approached Ganir’s quarters. She needed to find something, anything that would give her more information about where Blaise and his creature were. It seemed unlikely they would live in a desolate canyon, though that canyon could still be a good place to start looking for them.

Opening the door quietly, Augusta surveyed the room. Ganir was almost impossibly neat. She couldn’t find any recently written notes lying about, or jars of Life Capture droplets. As she looked around, however, she noticed a single droplet inside his Sphere.

Without hesitation she walked over to it, sat down in his chair, and brought the droplet to her mouth.

* * *

Ganir observed the three men who were tied up in his study—Barson’s soldiers who had been captured in a tavern in Turingrad. The binds were not necessary, strictly speaking, as he had already pacified them with a spell. Still, it paid to be cautious. Some stronger minds could snap out of the lethargy of the spell prematurely, which could be a problem with these men. He had to concentrate on the key spell, the spell that would finally rid him of the nuisance that was Barson.

At that moment, a Contact message reached his mind.

“Ganir, this is Blaise. I wanted to confirm your suspicions. Jandison was indeed the one who told me what the vote breakdown was.”

Hearing that, Ganir was overcome with a fury so strong, he actually shook with it. Because of Jandison’s treachery, he had lost Louie and then nearly lost Blaise. Ganir had never had children of his own, and Dasbraw’s boys had been the closest he’d gotten to having sons. And now Louie was dead, and Blaise hated him.

Jandison would pay for this. Ganir would make sure of that.

In the meantime, there was another, more urgent problem that required handling. Barson made a fatal error by pretending to be dead . . . because now Ganir would make sure that the lie became reality.

Stepping toward the captured men, he pulled out his Interpreter Stone and began loading the cards he’d prepared earlier. This was a spell he was quite proud of; it was unfortunate that nobody would ever learn of it. This degree of mind control was the most advanced psychological sorcery, and Ganir didn’t know anyone else who could do something of this magnitude.

No, that wasn’t true, he corrected himself. Gala, Blaise’s creation, could do this and more. She had literally changed the brain of Davish without forcibly controlling his thoughts, as Ganir was about to do with these soldiers. And the effect of her spell was permanent in nature, while Ganir’s was temporary at best—though a few hours was all he needed to achieve his goal.

He desperately wished he could talk to her, to learn about how her mind worked and how she had come to be. He wanted to delve into the mystery that was this Spell Realm-born creature, and it was frustrating to him that Blaise was so overprotective of her. The young man saw her as a desirable woman—which Ganir could still understand on some level—but her beauty blinded Blaise to her true potential. With someone like Gala at his side, Ganir would be unstoppable. He would never need to use intrigue or subtlety with the Council again. One touch of her pretty hands, and they would think whatever he wished them to think.

As the spell he’d unleashed on the soldiers finally took effect, Ganir could see the glazed look in their eyes. It was safe to let them go. Their programming was simple: kill Barson and then themselves. If, by some chance, the last part didn’t work out, they would not remember any of it anyway, as the spell was designed to suppress their memory of this mind manipulation.

Untying the soldiers, Ganir ushered them out of his room, taking a look outside first to make sure nobody saw them leave.

Then, just as he was about to sit down and figure out how best to solve the Jandison issue, he heard a knock on the door. Annoyed, he pricked his finger and touched the bloody spot to his sphere, ending the current recording.

* * *

Coming out of the Life Capture, Augusta felt the heavy pounding of her own heart. So that was why she’d encountered Barson’s men in the hallway; Ganir had set them against her lover. Her blood ran cold as she remembered seeing them in practice; as good as Barson was, his men were also well-trained—and, most importantly, he would not be expecting any treachery from them.

Jumping to her feet, Augusta ran out of the room, desperate to find Barson. Regardless of their differences, she needed to warn him about this. She didn’t know why Ganir hated Barson so much. Her lover had once hinted that the Council Leader had purposefully misinformed them about the larger-than-expected peasant rebellion, but she’d forgotten about it, too distracted by Blaise’s creature. It didn’t matter now, though. She had to find Barson before Ganir’s plan could come to fruition.

She couldn’t stand to lose him again.

Chapter 27: Gala

As soon as they heard the word ‘storm,’ the villagers sitting around Gala jumped to their feet with panicked expressions on their faces.

Gala stared at them curiously. “A storm? Are you talking about one of the ocean storms from beyond the mountains?” She had seen a regular storm before—had, in fact, inadvertently created one—and it hadn’t seemed all that bad to her. The upcoming weather had to be something different to warrant such reactions.

“Yes,” Liva said tersely, bending down to collect the remnants of the food. “We need to take shelter in our homes and hope that we don’t get a direct hit.”

“What happens if you do?” Blaise asked, looking more intrigued than worried. “Are these storms truly as bad as they say?”

“Worse,” the old man said succinctly. “Far worse than you can imagine, sorcerer. You may not believe in the Thunder Creature, but you are about to witness its power.”

Within minutes, all of the villagers left the clearing, heading back to their homes. Blaise took Gala’s hand, and they hurried after Liva, who was all but running at this point. “We need to close the shutters and board up our windows,” she told Blaise. “I don’t know when the storm is getting here, but we might have less than an hour, given how loud that thunder was.”

“Why don’t I help?” Blaise suggested. “If you can gather everybody, I should be able to put a protective shield around them. It would be more effective than just boarding up the windows.”

“How strong is your shield?” Liva asked doubtfully. “These storms tend to be very, very powerful.”

Blaise considered it, a thoughtful expression appearing on his face. “All right, how about this?” he suggested after a moment. “We’ll board up the windows, and I will strengthen the walls of a couple of houses. Everybody can gather there, and then I will also put a protective shield around those houses.”

Liva nodded. “That’s a good idea. I’ll go tell the others, get them to come to my house. It’s one of the larger ones, and between my house and that of my neighbor, we should be able to accommodate everyone. I’ll meet you back home.”

Gala watched as the older woman disappeared down the street, then looked up at Blaise. “Have you ever seen one of these storms?” she asked, wondering about the phenomenon. “Is it truly that much worse than regular lightning and thunder?”

“I’ve never seen one,” Blaise told her, reaching out to take her hand as they walked toward Liva’s place. “I’ve heard stories, though, and read about them. There is a good reason why the mountains are not considered a habitable location.”

At that moment, a blinding flash of light illuminated the purple-streaked sky, and the thunderous boom that followed was so loud that Gala literally felt the ground shake beneath her feet. “It sounds like it’s getting closer,” she commented worriedly, looking up. The villagers’ fear was starting to rub off on her, even though she still didn’t understand how some rain, wind, and lightning could be that dangerous.

“It does, doesn’t it?” Blaise stopped at the entrance to Liva’s house and looked up at the sky himself. “You know, I never thought I would get an opportunity to see one of these in action. It should be fascinating—particularly if we make sure that no one gets hurt.”