Chapter 162: Split-Will Training

Chapter 162: Split-Will Training

Sebastien

Month 4, Day 1, Thursday 10:55 a.m.

‘Perhaps splitting your Will isn’t actually so hard, just like casting through a Conduit held somewhere besides your hands or your forehead isn’t so hard. Maybe, the only real barrier is getting stuck in a mental rut, just like Professor Lacer talks about. Maybe, if everyone wasn’t so convinced it was impossible, it would be easier,’ Sebastien reasoned. She had a relatively high opinion of herself, she knew, but she didn’t imagine she was some destined prodigy that would overturn all the established rules of magic. ‘This has to have an explanation. If Myrddin could do it, too, that’s proof that it’s not so impossible. But there’s only one way to find out.’

And so, Sebastien hurried to the library, where she checked out a reference filled with old and uncommon glyphs, some of which were only used in the far reaches of the known lands. When she arrived at Dryden Manor, she hurried past Sharon as politely as possible, and found the book hidden under the floor, as always, seemingly untouched since her last visit.

She studied the shifting symbol on the front cover. Most of the time, it was incoherent, but sporadically, it resolved into a glyph she recognized, before shifting into headache-inducing incomprehensibility once more. She stroked her fingers over the ancient leather with one hand.

Soon, the glyph shifted to something she recognized—ironically meaning “open” or “unlock”— she turned the full force of her Will toward the concept, her free hand carefully gripping her Conduit, to mitigate risks. Applying Will without actually channeling energy into a spell was like breathing an emotional opera song. The muscles in one’s throat would clench, breaths deep and posture straight, and yet no actual air could hit the voice box, no sound pass the lips. It would be very easy to slip up, some of the inherent passion of the mimicry leaking through into action.

Rather than the incoherent shifting it had displayed up until that point, the glyph on the front settled under her Will, then very purposefully flowed into a rare form of “flight” that she almost didn’t recognize, and held there. As she’d guessed, she must have passed the identity authentication without trouble.

Grinning so hard her cheeks hurt, Sebastien changed her Will to match. This continued twice more, until she hit a glyph she didn’t recognize. She tried to hold her Will steady while she turned to the reference text she’d brought for this very purpose, but finding a glyph based on its shape alone, among tens of thousands of others, was an involved process.

Myrddin’s journal only waited a few seconds before the glyph once more dissolved into random incoherence that made her eyes ache.

When she found the glyph she hadn’t known, which was “pressurized depth” often associated with the part of the ocean where light from the surface could no longer reach, she made a second attempt. Again, she ran into a glyph she didn’t know. The process repeated its until she grew frustrated and her eyes and head began to throb from the strain of examining the journal.

So Sebastien set aside her efforts for the moment and turned toward something she hoped would be more rewarding—refinement of the nine heavens, third sequence. Whatever that meant, exactly.

A note from Professor Lacer encouraged her to read through all the instructions at least twice before she attempted to cast the spell, and after that gain a measure of mastery over the physical movements and the audible intonation separately, before attempting to combine both together with actual casting.

Sebastien read through page upon page of complex diagrams of the human body moving in very specific ways that went along with tonal sounds that Professor Lacer had translated into basic syllables rising and falling along modern musical notation. In addition to all that, to cast the spell one would have to keep in mind the mental focus and understanding of the process. These techniques were never meant to be learned from a book. Even for someone like her, who had no trouble retaining written information, it would have been so much easier to understand if she could simply watch someone else perform the spell and try to mimic them.

It took her over an hour to get through the first read-through, and left her mind in a completely different state of exhaustion than her attempts on the journal.

More of said attempts led nowhere, faltering each time when she met a glyph she didn’t recognize. ‘I need to learn a lot more glyphs,’ Sebastien realized. It seemed somewhat excessive that there should be thousands upon thousands of glyphs in existence. What spell would need such a thing? But there were quite a few glyphs with duplicate meanings, or subtle variations in context, or obscure uses that could only be relevant in some of the strangest of spells. At her level, with the kind of spells she could cast, she had no reason to know or use the large majority.

Specificity helped in any Word structure of a spell, but even then most high-level effects could be accomplished with only a thousand or so glyphs. But Myrddin had known more, and so Sebastien had to know more.

She switched between Myrddin’s journal and the esoteric spell until the evening, when Sharon forced her to come down to dinner.

Oliver arrived halfway through the meal, brightening noticeably when he saw Sebastien. He joined them at the servant’s table in the kitchen, serving his own meal and telling jokes and funny stories throughout.

He made them laugh so hard that Thomas, doorman and general laborer, choked on a piece of food. The man grew so purple that Sebastien grew worried and cast a spell to clear his airways—one she most often used to erase the signs of crying—to great applause.

Sharon broke out the cooking brandy, mixed it with some honey and spices and heated it over the stove, and forced them all to drink the overly sweet concoction.

Sebastien tried to refuse, but admitted after she had swallowed an obligatory cup that it was indeed supremely warming, filling her with a gentle weight and flushing her cheeks. She was relaxed without being clumsy or tired, and even tried a few stories of her own, carefully edited to remove specifics and incriminating information.

When Sharon and the others finally left, the round woman hugged her close, something Sebastien found she didn’t mind so much when she felt like this.

Oliver stood at the entrance to the kitchen, leaning against the doorjamb with his ankles crossed and his hands in his pockets, watching fondly. When they were alone, he straightened. “I have some news,” he announced, something in his tone making it obvious that this was not positive information.

“Tell me,” Sebastien replied, straightening her shoulders in preparation for a blow.

“The coppers have a plan to try and catch you during your father’s sentencing.”

She smiled and relaxed. “I know. That’s part of why I plan to spend most of the day locked away in a warded room at Liza’s.”

His eyes widened, and then he chuckled. “Oh. Well, if you’re not irrepressibly drawn to the drama of it all, as they seem to be placing all their bets on, no matter what measures they put in place to capture you, it won’t be effective.”

If this were before Sebastien had learned of Oliver’s secrets and grown wiser to his manipulations, she might have told him about her plan to take advantage of the coppers’ assumptions in a bid to relieve them of her blood and thus their only leverage over her. But things were different now, even if he didn’t know it, and so she just smiled and nodded. “Well, tell me about their plans anyway. I don’t want to be caught unawares if they try something at a different time.”

Oliver didn’t reveal anything particularly worrying. Heavily armed teams ready to respond at the slightest sign of her appearance, magical artifacts to overpower and capture her, soldiers and Red Guard agents called in to assist each team of coppers with anything that required heavier magical power. Even some sort of special cell prepared for her in the highest-security wing of Harrow Hill.

None of it would be useful if she didn’t walk into their trap.

But that didn’t seem to be true. Siobhan could think of many times she’d been in the presence of someone trying to divine something about her, and the ward still activated.

She said as much, and Liza smirked. “Did you think stopping the magic from finding you was the only protection I embedded in my ward? Do you think me an amateur? Those disks in your back shunt aside divination rays so thoroughly you might as well be a hole in reality. That protects you from active attempts using sympathetic links, but my ward goes a lot farther than that to stop any and all other methods of divination. We just spoke of how classifications can be misleading, did we not? Divination is not all poppet effigies and spells using your target’s discarded fingernail clippings. My ward shunts aside, reflects, captures, discourages, and devours any non-mundane possibility of information leaking to magical observation.” Liza’s lips spread into a prideful grin, her white teeth starkly contrasting the dark skin around them.

“It can’t stop any and all outside effects, only information leaks. And so it protects me only when the effect, whatever it might be, requires information the caster doesn’t have,” Siobhan said, grinning back.

Liza crossed her arms, irritation leaking back into her expression as she admitted, “That is so, but it is also true that without the ability to shunt aside the ephemeral rays, the ward becomes much weaker. It is easiest to avoid the fight against your opponent’s magic entirely.”

“Wait, is that why I can’t scry myself?” Siobhan blurted. “I tried once, and the ward barely activated. But of course, I know where I am, and everything about me, better than anyone. The ward never had a chance. I thought...” Siobhan trailed off, because she couldn’t say that she had thought the attempt failed because the concepts of finding herself while simultaneously empowering the ward to avoid being located were simply too divergent, and her Will couldn’t manage. It seemed she hadn’t been the problem at all. At least not in the way she had assumed.

As Siobhan helped with entering the records into their experiment log books and cleaning up the hotel room of the signs of the sleep-proxy spell, she remained lost in thought. ‘If divination and curses that required divination both use some sort of invisible “ray” or “tendril” to find their target—’ both of which were ways she’d heard it described—‘how does binding magic differ? And why is it relevant to detaching the output of my spells?’

As they rode back to Liza’s apartment with the back of a wagon filled with some covered boxes containing the ravens being used in their testing, Siobhan shifted around in her seat, trying to find the muscles that hurt least to apply pressure to, and asked, “Is the way divination differs from binding magic relevant to detaching the output of your spells from the spell array’s bounding Circle?”

“I do not know. I cannot detach the output of my spells,” Liza said. When Siobhan looked at her with obvious surprise the woman huffed. “It is not a feat that the military teaches, even in their more covert divisions. Someone on my squad could do it, and it did come in quite useful in certain situations, but I was our artifact and divination specialist.”

“Was that person a free-caster? Perhaps you could ask them about it and pass along the information?”

Liza remained silent for a long few moments, looking resolutely ahead until Siobhan suspected she had somehow offended the older woman. “He never became a free-caster. And I am afraid he is not available to teach anyone anything.”

Siobhan didn’t pride herself on her tact, but she knew enough to change the subject. Most likely, this teammate of Liza’s was dead.

Still, she found that the conversation had drawn a veil from her metaphorical eyes. ‘I can split my Will in two different directions. Why have I had such trouble splitting the output of my spell from the source?’ She had the urge to try the exercise once more, but refrained. If she figured out a way to accomplish detachment in a completely different way than Professor Lacer intended, he might be able to tell, and thus reveal her ability. But the greatest deterrent was her worry that just splitting a piece of a spell off in the wrong way sounded like a great way to lose control of the magic and end up as an entry in the book Professor Lacer had gifted her.

There was a reason why true output detachment was dangerous enough that Lacer required her to practice it under his supervision. It wasn’t something she should experiment with on her own.

‘And he can’t split his Will, so whether it works or not, it’s unlikely to be the revelation he was trying to impart to me.’ That night, as she lay in bed and considered the tether method she’d been using, then imagined what it might be like to just sever it, splitting the input from the output in the same way she split one part of her mind into two, she realized what was missing.

‘How is a spell with detached output receiving the necessary energy to create its effect? There is no spell array for power to travel through. Is it being channeled through the air? But heat spillover would probably create a visible ripple with stronger spells. Or, perhaps, the power needs to be converted to some kind of invisible vehicle. Like extra high or low wavelength electromagnetic radiation.’

Sebastien sat up in her bed, the idea too startling to hold while lying down. ‘Is that how divination rays work? Because magic requires energy to work. If they are sending feelers out halfway across the city, gathering information, and then returning that information, there must be some medium upon which the information rides, right? Some energy that their spell array is radiating, maybe literally.’

She retrieved her grimoire and began to scribble down her epiphanies and speculation in an scrawl that was even more spidery than usual. ‘But if that’s the case, how does binding magic work? All the restrictions and downsides that divination faces make sense if I’m correct. Distance, barriers, and wards increase the cost or even halt the spell entirely. But once cast, binding magic cannot be thwarted so easily. How is it getting its energy?’ That question yielded no sudden ideas or plausible answers, and so she set it aside in the vast mental sea of things she wondered about but didn’t yet have an explanation for.

One day, if she had her way that sea would run dry.

She snorted at herself. ‘Or, more likely, the more you learn the more you will realize you don’t understand, and you were just too ignorant to realize that you didn’t know before.’

And so she returned to her study and practice, one painful movement of the light-refinement sequence melding into another, glyph after glyph embedded in the depths of her mind, and the occasional craving for lighting-quick energy reminding her to have a meal and thus suppress her cravings.

It was after about a week of this that Sebastien was taken totally by surprise as the glyph on the front of Myrddin’s journal split into two.

She almost fumbled, but the urgency of not knowing how long the glyphs would wait for her spurred her to action. Her Conduit pressed painfully into her clenched fist. Sebastien let her eyes unfocus a little bit, so that neither glyph was clearer than the other, and then, mentally, did what her eyes could not and focused on both at once, wielding all the force of her Will.

The glyphs switched calmly to another set.

Almost immediately, she ran into one that she did not know, and her progress was lost.

But Sebastien was not disappointed.

‘I was right. Myrddin could split his Will, just like me. Perhaps it really isn’t so difficult.’ But she quickly discarded the idea of going to Professor Lacer and showing him that he was wrong. Not only did she feel no impetus to help the Architects of Khronos decipher the journals they still held, she didn’t need the scrutiny that such an ability might bring her.

And, somewhere deep inside, she feared that if someone were to dig, they might find that something was very wrong with her, after all.

She was no Myrddin, able to do as she wished while fearing no one. And if it were true that the brillig were dual casters, what did it say, that they had been slaughtered to the very last?

If someone else had accomplished what she could, surely it would have been news enough that Thaddeus Lacer, with all his connections and his clearance within the Red Guard, would have heard of. If she was not alone, any others were keeping their ability a closely guarded secret.

But this also meant that unless someone else discovered a trick to confuse whatever mechanism the journals were using to monitor the caster, she was currently the only one in the known lands who could decipher Myrddin’s journals.

And what was that, if not a form of leverage?