Chapter 194: Damien's Report

Chapter 194: Damien's Report

Sebastien

Month 5 Day 9, Sunday 7:05 p.m.

After an entire weekend of casting through most of her waking hours, Sebastiens mind still felt like a well-used muscle, weak and on the verge of soreness. But her debts were paid, she had resources left over, and her Will was growing.

Sebastien stopped at her apartment to write a return letter for Professor Lacer.

She was very aware that once the letter left her possession, it would no longer be protected against divination. She did not want to lie, partially because doing so might damage his willingness or ability to help her, but she also had no intention of revealing too much.

His speculation had opened a broad spectrum of possible worries, but she could not follow up her previous question with one about Aberrants, or any questions about the incident in which Grandfather had died.

What is this physical tribute you have prepared?

I appreciate your thoughtful answer to my question. Regrettably, I cannot divulge more about the circumstances behind it, because I do not know. The only hint that was given to me I have already passed on. More research is required.

I would appreciate more information about this dream curse.

Sebastien paused, lifting her pen carefully away from the paper so as not to leave an ink blot. She also wanted to ask about the Red Guards experiments with shamanry, but his warning had been quite clear. However, that only made her more curious to learn about it.

She wouldnt have considered this avenue if she were not desperate.

She had once been quite interested in divination, in the hopes of divining the future and gaining some tools to mitigate oncoming bad fortune. But she had no talent in the craft. And then shed actually met a shaman. He claimed to be able to breach the walls between the mortal world and the domain of spirits in order to achieve effects similar to divination. Hed had her run errands for days to prove her dedication before giving her an alchemical concoction that was supposed to open her inner eye.

It left her spewing from both ends, incapacitated with pain and hallucinating for two days.

When she came to her senses, she was terrified, half dead, and had nothing to show for it but dream-like memories that flashed behind her lids in sickly colors when she closed her eyes.

You just dont have the constitution for greatness, dearie, hed said.

Shed tried to kick him in the knee out of sudden rage but was too weak to do even that.

Ennis made it clear how much of a waste of time the whole endeavor had been. He was sure she would be better off pretending to be a shaman to con people out of a handful of coin.

Since then, shed focused on practical magic, something she could use to affect her reality rather than trying to pull the answers to life from the ether.

But, no matter how much of a scam shamanry is, if there are any real techniques I could learn, perhaps I could create my own mental wards to reinforce whatever Grandfather did, Sebastien thought.

She continued writing.

Of myself: I am Siobhan Naught, but I am also the Raven Queen, and I have been called by other names. In some ways, names have a power all their own, but in other ways, they are just labels.

Sebastien hesitated before using the weird chant again, but she felt that it was cryptic enough while still being honest. It would allow her to reply to his request for information without really saying anything about herself or her life.

I am a changeling like the seasons, a daughter of shadow and light, of Charybdis mists and ravens flight, and always I seek after mysteries.

Make of that what you will.

For your attempts on Myrddins journal, the man had capabilities and knowledge that I have never heard of from others. While many of his exploits are now thought to be exaggerated by rumor due to their implausibility, I know for a fact that several are quite literal. For instance, the ability to split ones Will.

To my surprise, I have found that people do not practice casting two spells at once. I cannot be sure why.

I would caution against attempts at personal experimentation here, unless you are quite sure that a human such as yourself could survive the attempt without breaking. However, if you can find a method to recreate this ability, or someone capable of it already, you will make progress.

She was careful not to say that he would be able to read the book with that skill, because there could be some other barrier to success that she hadnt yet encountered.

She resisted the urge to add more questions about the Red Guards secrets or where she might learn more about these recent advancements in shamanry. It might be taken as a request to violate his vows to them, and she was not sure how he might take that. Nor what his vows might require him to do, if she said something that made him believe she could be a threat.

I will see what might be found elsewhere, and then, if that bears no fruit, I will gauge how dangerous it might be to ask him. Perhaps once I have spent more time gaining his trust.

She dropped off the letter for Tanya to ferry on her way back to the University and made it to the dorms only a few minutes before curfew.

The week passed uneventfully, spent on classes, homework, spell practice, and a search of the library for unrestricted books that might give her some deeper understanding of the things Professor Lacer had mentioned in his last letter. In what free time remained, she continued to practice light-refinement. One of the spells effects was supposed to be clearing intrusive mental forces. And what were her nightmares, if not that?

Perhaps it was working, because though she had been dreading what might come after her experience under the sensory deprivation spells, her nightmares were no harder to deal with than usual. In fact, she slept easier than normal with a combination of light-refinement practiced during the day and Newtons self-calming spell in the evening.

There were no attempts to scry her and no emergency communications from anyone she knew. She had completed the fourth repetition of the guiding light ritual, and though the symboland possible glyphshed created lingered in her mind longer each time, like a dark spot after staring at the sun, there had been no struggle with wild magic or backlash.

The next weekend, Sebastien went around the city improving her emergency stashes and creating a few new ones. She added more coin, water canteens with moisture-gathering arrays drawn on their bases, and some quick disguise items. Along with that, she left some of the orb-weaver silk sheets shed been creating. Some, she had painted spell arrays on, in liquid that was a mixture of giant squid ink, dragon blood, and flakes of natural gold. To that, she had added the sap from two different trees to keep the ink from bleeding, even when exposed to the elements. Other sheets she left bare, to be used as needed with the bottle of conductive liquid and brush she added to each stash.

Sebastien didnt trust this sense of normalcy. She suspected it was just the lull in the eye of the storm, and if she grew complacent, her future self would look back in desperate regret.

Im not sure yet. Not an obvious one, anyway. But thats not my point.

What is your point?

The Red Guard is extremely competent and powerful. But the problem is, theyre so secretive, even when it doesnt make sense that they would need to keep their methods confidential. I keep noticing it. They perform some crazy feat of magic that Ive never heard of before, but the newspaper article barely gives two vague sentences for it. The papers that regularly provided more detail have all gone out of business within the last few decades, which is strange, right?

Damien continued before Sebastien could respond. And maybe that could just be a coincidence, but I cant stop thinking about it. I suspect that the Red Guard has some kind of specific anti-Aberrant spells that they dont want the public to know about. Just like how the details of the sundered zone spell are so secret.

Damien rubbed his fingers over his chapped bottom lip and turned to face Sebastien. There are innocent explanations. Like, they dont want terrorists to develop countermeasures to their proprietary spells. Or they dont want stupid people trying to mimic their spells without the kind of training they go through to be able to control them. But I dont think thats it. I suspect I suspect the Red Guard is using blood magic against the Aberrants.

He paused to let the gravity of this accusation sink in, but Sebastiens mind had jumped to the spell that the ancient thaumaturge had cast at Knave Knoll, before she accidentally killed him.

That man was a rogue Red Guard agent who had abandoned his vows and gone on the run. And hed cast a spell so strange that not only had she never heard of its like before, she couldnt even understand how or why it behaved as it did. The meteor hanging in the air, the little dust-sized parasites phasing through matter, the walls and doors fusing together. It was complex and powerful and impressive enough to befit a Red Guard member, but why the flashiness? Why the wastefulness, when the same result might have been generated without the need to create any physical phenomena?

The man would have had to use an entire sack of beast cores to power such a spell, surely?

But Sebastien didnt think he had. That kind of seeming wastefulnesslimitless power spilling out in strange ways as an effect propagatedwas seen only one other place.

Aberrants.

They seemed to break the laws of magic that those with unbroken Wills and coherent minds were restricted to.

What would happen if I tried to use a piece of an Aberrant as a spell component? Sebastien wondered.

If she were inclined to gamble, she would bet that, in the hands of a powerful thaumaturge, the resulting spell would look something like what had happened at Knave Knoll.

She thought of Newton, turned into strings the color of flesh and bone, spilling out and consuming every living, frightened thing it touched, like some kind of fungus. What kind of effect would come from casting with a piece of that string?

Sebastien had one hidden in the floor under the chest at the foot of her bed, after all. She could test her theory.

No, no, Im not going to do that. I have no idea how dangerous it might be, and I can learn from my mistakes. I will not recklessly endanger my life, nor the lives of those around me.

Sebastien swallowed, looking again at Damiens chapped lips and wan face. Is it possible Im jumping to conclusions? She thought back over Professor Lacers lecture about what to do when you were suspicious. I want to know the truth, no matter how it makes me feel.

Is there any evidence that could, in the right light, act to disprove your suspicion that the Red Guard uses blood magic? Sebastien asked. Think hard.

Damien blinked at her. Well, except for the fact that blood magic is evil, and maybeif that isnt a lie, tooleads to corrupted Wills and increased break events? The fact that the Red Guard is supposed to stand for justice and their oaths to protect the world from magic gone wrong?

Except for that, Sebastien agreed. Because she knew that blood magic wasnt evil. The Red Guard might have their oaths, but they also did things like malign the dead and then place mind-controlling spells on their families. Which was, in her opinion, one of the actually evil ways to use blood magic.

I cant think of anything else, Damien said. Maybe theres some secret reason for their actions that would never occur to me, but He trailed off helplessly.

Sebastien closed her eyes and breathed deeply. Then she opened them again. There are some things I need to tell you. She checked to make sure the sound-muffling spell would still cover them and then motioned to the narrow bed. Sit?

She pulled her satchels strap over her head, reached inside, and turned on the dowsing artifact, which was currently using the other half of a small twig shed broken and tucked in her pocket as a target. She turned up the artifacts strength to its highest limit, then sat close enough to Damien that their arms touched. This close, he would be protected by the spillover effects, too. Maybe this was unnecessary, but it couldnt hurt, and she had no idea what the Red Guard might be capable of anymore.

Sebastien cleared her throat and, haltingly at first, but then with growing ease, told Damien what had happened to Newtons family.

The Red Guard does blood magic on Lenores innocent citizens, Damien whispered.

That, in large part, was what your mission was about, Sebastien said. We wanted to figure out how often they play with peoples memories surrounding an Aberrant event. Because obviously, they are going to extensive lengths to lie to the public in at least some cases. But DamienI dont think theyre trying to hide the blood magic. Or, not just that. Those proprietary, powerful spells that they use against Aberrants? I think I think theyre using Aberrant components against other Aberrants.

By this point, Damien was so pale that, if he hadnt been sitting down, Sebastien might have worried that he would faint and collapse.

She told him about the attack on Knave Knoll, and specifically some of the details that hadnt made it into the papers, though she didnt mention how she knew.

It makes a horrible kind of sense, Damien croaked. He swallowed, his Adams apple bobbing up and down. You would need powerful weapons to fight powerful enemies. But thisif theyve been lying about this, what else?

Sebastien thought she understood what he was feeling. Unmoored, floating in space as the ground and walls that he had grown up believing in fell away. I dont know. But I think you should hand the mission over to me. You can teach me the spells you were learning, but its too dangerous for you to continue digging into this.

But not too dangerous for you?

Sebastien pressed her lips together.

No. Im not going to stop, Damien said.

Sebastien hesitated. Damienour organization isnt as large or powerful as you might like to believe. We might not even be able to do anything impactful with the information. And if the Red Guard were to find out and come after usI dont know that we could stop them.

That just makes uncovering the truth even more important! The Red Guard arent bound by Crown law. They are an independent, non-political force, and if they are corrupt, we need to know! He reached over and gripped her forearm. Sebastien, if this is true, think about what it means. What happened to Newton?

She stared at Damien.

Slowly, he released her arm. Im not giving up on this mission.