A Practical Guide to Sorcery-Chapter 241 - A Desperate Escape
Siobhan
Month 9, Day 12, Sunday 3:15 a.m.
‘The question I asked is not allowed,’ Siobhan thought as she raced into the darkness. She fumbled the light coaster out and used it to shine the way, confident that Thaddeus couldn’t see it through the shadow-familiar billowing out to fill the space left behind. ‘The Red Guard has decided that those who know must die.’ She would leave trying to figure out why, exactly, for a less critical moment. Thaddeus’s decision to try to make her forget was…understandable. Better than immediately trying to murder her, she supposed.
Except that, for her, she might legitimately prefer to die rather than have her mind tampered with once more. It would be a violation of her very being, and she couldn’t allow it. No matter what, even if she had to become the kind of wild animal that gnawed its own leg off to escape a trap.
Siobhan couldn’t tell if Thaddeus was following her—her own wild breath and the echo of her footsteps were too loud. But if he was, he would catch up quickly. His stride was longer than hers, and this body simply couldn’t handle the same physical exertion as her other. Still, he would be blinded, and it should be hard for even the bravest man to run full speed without seeing where they were going.
As she ran, she reached into her bag and retrieved two potions from feel and memory alone. First, a fleetfoot potion. She felt the wind rush through her muscles and lighten her body as if she was filled with smoke rather than flesh. Second, quintessence of quicksilver. She’d gotten a tiny little vial of it in the Night Market. Not to play around with—especially not after her experience with the beamshell tincture—but for a situation where she needed what was essentially a short-term performance enhancer to save her life.
She let the metallic powder fall onto her tongue, where it seemed to coalesce into a thick liquid and easily rolled to the back of her mouth. She choked down the surprisingly disgusting concoction. Many products of alchemy were unappealing, but her body instinctually rejected this one. She had no comparisons by which to describe the taste and smell, except for being the complete antithesis of food, and the droplets had such strong surface tension that they refused to break apart on her tongue. If not for her self-control, she would have gagged it out.
But she immediately understood why people became addicted to it. It seemed to slow time while also doubling her brainpower. Even tiny details became noticeable, and her memories bobbed so close to the surface that she might have been able to relive them at will. She had known that memories were connected, and often used mnemonic techniques based on this to help her memorize new information. But now, just the taste of the air on her tongue called up a dozen different connected memories, both mundane and significant, and each she effortlessly scoured for something useful to her current situation.
‘My mind can hold all the thoughts. All of them.’ Of course, she immediately realized this was unfounded, semi-maniacal hubris, but the rush was undeniable.
She realized her panic was making her inefficient, so she adjusted her posture for maximum speed with minimum effort and forced her breaths to come in through her nose and out through her mouth in a rhythm that matched her footsteps, like Fekten had taught.
When she came to an intersection, she sent a part of her shadow, formed to look generally like her but as cold as could be, running in the opposite direction from her. She sent the greater mass of her shadow to follow it, too. If he was sensitive to the false clues, he might be fooled. Such a ruse was unlikely to be effective, but it might increase her chances of escape by a single percent or so.
She slowed for a moment, holding her breath just long enough to listen. She was able to note faint sounds of movement that might normally have gone unobserved.
Thaddeus was up and moving, but he was far behind.
Siobhan continued forward, this time at a slower pace that would make less noise and leave her the energy to react with full force to any surprises. Her shadow-clone was getting very far from her down the tunnel in the other direction now, so she stopped and made it pretend to hide.
She had a very serious problem to deal with now. She didn’t know the way out. She hadn’t memorized the entire network of caves, tunnels, and hallways cut through the white cliffs.
She stopped again to listen at another intersection, this one split between a more natural, rough-looking pathway and a man-made hallway. She even licked a finger and held it up to feel for wind and sniffed the air in the hope that the quintessence of quicksilver would bridge the gap in her knowledge and help her come up with a deduction.
After two seconds of contemplation, she chose the more natural terrain, both because it was sloped downward—and thus hopefully toward an exit—and because it would be harder to navigate without sight.
The part of her shadow “hiding” several hundred meters in the other direction absorbed a sudden flash of light, though Siobhan herself couldn’t see it past the shadow plugging the tunnel behind her.
She moved slowly in her physical body, trying to sense through the distant shadow. ‘Was he fooled?’ But the flash of light had disappeared as quickly as it came, and she didn’t sense any indication of his presence. Perhaps he had already realized the ruse and turned around. Or perhaps the light had been some kind of scouting spell, sent in advance. She couldn’t assume she had even the slightest idea of the extent of his capabilities.
The rough tunnel led down to an even rougher cave, filled with stalactites hanging from the ceiling and stalagmites rising from the ground, all of it somehow both slippery with damp and also rough enough to scrape off skin. On the far side, there seemed to be a low tunnel, through which she could hear the echo of a drip. With all the dripping going on in the cave, she would never have been assured of finding something on the other side without the quintessence of quicksilver, but it made parsing all the information and making these kinds of deductions unnaturally easy.
She had made it most of the way to the small tunnel when another spike of fear rose up from nowhere, giving her the unmistakable impression that she was being chased and the monster was right behind her. As though a dream was peeking into reality, she had a flashing, waking nightmare that she was sneaking a look through the peephole of a doorway, only to see an eye pressed to the other side, watching her back.
Siobhan flinched and fell to the ground behind some stalagmites only a second before a powerful wave of divination rolled over her. She pressed herself to the rough stone, taking what minor protection the jagged shield provided, and crawled forward into the small tunnel. The scent of mineral-laden water and the half-musty, half-vegetative smell of lichen and other small organisms that could survive the dark filled her nose and mouth with their nuance.
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She scraped her hands and knees and tore her dress as she crawled. If she had been wearing her new, fancy battle dress, that wouldn’t have happened. ‘Hells, if only I had outright bought all of that warded jewelry from Liza, too. I could have just gone around all the time looking like I was prepared for a meeting with the High Crown. Always, always, it seems I regret my own complacency. If I get out of this alive, I must beat it into my thick head that there is no such thing as being over-prepared or overly paranoid.’
The further she got into the tunnel, the more the stone pressing all around her provided protection from Thaddeus’s magic. Unfortunately, it was meagre protection in the face of the crushing pressure of his attempt to find her.
Thaddeus was too strong, had too clear an idea of where she might be, and was confident enough to pit his strength against that of the Raven Queen. If not for the weight of stone between them, the claws of his magic would have sunk in and rent apart her fragile, slippery shell. Every moment, the invasive sensation grew stronger.
Siobhan came out of the tunnel on the other side and lurched to her feet, but the terrain here was almost impassable, and she was once again reduced to climbing over obstacles. She had to put the light-coaster crystal side down in her mouth and clench it between her teeth because she needed both of her hands just to move. She skidded down the side of a crevasse and then lifted her body up the other side, flailing to raise one leg over the edge as she cursed her weak woman’s arms. Without the ability to move fast, to put dozens or hundreds of meters more matter between them, she had only minutes left. Possibly seconds.
With a brain running on quicksilver, that was quite a long time.
There was no guarantee any amount of intervening material or distance would save her. A person of Thaddeus Lacer’s power might be able to pierce through the white cliffs entirely, even if he were standing atop them and she tunneled all the way to the base.
The loss of blood was growing as she Sacrificed it for power to the disks in her back, very unfortunate at a time that she needed to be at her best physically, too. Her mind scrabbled uselessly for options as she felt the divination continue to scan for her like a million spotlights sweeping back and forth, every moment growing in intensity and number until it felt like they would sear right through her.
It might have been hopeless, but that imagery gave her an idea. This divination spell might be invisible, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t transmitting energy. She might not be able to see it, but whatever tendrils, waves, or rays it used, they carried magic in them, a source of power that allowed them to recognize and return to their caster the information they had gleaned. In that way, they weren’t so different from sound or light waves.
What was sound, if not a kind of vibration, a form of heat? She could Sacrifice that for power. And as for light, she already had plenty of practice doing so. How different could energy that she could not see and did not understand the form of be?
Liza’s artifact, so greedily drinking the blood that passed under the surface of the skin in her back, was able to “shunt aside, reflect, capture, discourage, and devour any non-mundane possibility of information leaking to magical observation.” That was what Liza had said. But it was relatively weak, and her Will too feeble to bolster it the way she needed.
Still, if she could handle the divination rays, it could handle keeping the fact that she’d done so a secret. It could disguise the empty spot in the world she created.
So Siobhan bent her Will, and her shadow, to devouring the unseen. ‘Don’t focus on the fact that you don’t actually understand what a divination wave is,’ she told herself. She stopped moving and held her hands cupped together in front of her mouth, as if casting the shadow-familiar for the first time. ‘Focus on the idea of an invisible spotlight, devoured by your shadow just like all that is visible. Your shadow is an empty space, devoid of heat and life, devoid of communication, devoid of thought and the concept of information itself.’ She wasn’t sure how well this attempt to add a bit of extra transmogrification flavor to the shadow-familiar would work, but without true understanding, she needed whatever glue she could find to hold the magical effect together. ‘Devour, and arise.’
Her shadow obeyed.
The pressure eased. The disks in her back warmed and began to draw less of her blood, and the part of her Will assigned to empowering the divination-diverting ward was suddenly applying far more force than necessary.
Siobhan spat out the light coaster and pressed her hands to her mouth to muffle a deep-throated laugh. Had the answer been this easy, this simple, all along?
‘Well, perhaps not.’ Siobhan lowered her hands, put the light coaster back in her mouth, and continued to scramble across the cave room. She hadn’t had the skills to do something like this from the start, and even if she had understood the concepts involved, her control over the shadow-familiar spell might not have been strong enough. She could do quite a lot with it now that hadn’t been within its original parameters.
‘I’m a genius!’ she concluded, mentally patting herself on the back.
After a while, Thaddeus seemed to give up on finding her, and she made her way to the far side of the gnarled, twisted cave area. She squeezed through a crevasse that led out back into a hallway and began to search for a way out again. She had been walking for a few minutes, and the fleetfoot potion had worn off, when another feeling of warning bloomed in her mind, seemingly from nowhere.
This one was less directed than the previous two, and though she spun around looking for danger, she saw nothing. She had barely turned to start running again, one hand in her pack to retrieve another fleetfoot potion, when the magic hit.
A ripple went through the stone like a wave on the edge of a pond, and as it passed, the stone melted. As if springing a trap, tendrils of liquid stone exploded upward and wrapped around her. She tried to rip through them, but every step, every movement, set off more.
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The wave continued on, leaving the stone as hard as if nothing had happened, except for the new, melted appearance of the walls and the bindings reaching up from the floor to Siobhan’s hips.
She reached for the spell rod nestled in the dip of her spine and pulled it out. Her fingers felt for the engraved symbol indicating the stone-disintegration spell. She twisted that segment, causing the circular spell array painted on orb-weaver silk and framed in metal to spring outward. Pulling from the beast core nestled against her skin beside the black sapphire Conduit, Siobhan had turned the stone around her ankles to rough sand and almost freed herself when the wave of liquid stone returned from where it had come.
This time, the remaining tendrils squeezed down hard enough around her legs to bruise the flesh, and as if they were somehow sentient and had “found” her physically and thus had no need for a divination, her ward broke in the same moment that it attempted to activate. She had no chance to resist.
Dread covered her in a cold sweat, and she redoubled her efforts to disintegrate the stone, adding panicked yanks of her legs to the effort to escape. It only took her fifteen seconds to get free, but every second her sense of foreboding grew stronger. Half of it was her own natural response, and half another of those strange daydream-sensation warnings. It was telling her that she had put her hand in the cookie jar without realizing that in the doorway behind her, the monster who owned those cookies loomed.
She had freed herself and taken two steps when Thaddeus burst out of the side of the hallway a few meters in front of her. The stone closed up behind him, leaving no sign of his passage. He skidded to a stop and took several deep, gasping breaths. He opened his hand and let the shards of a depleted beast core fall to the ground, where they clinked and scattered.
‘Did he just cast some sort of stone-traversal spell and sprint toward me in a straight line, diving right through everything in between?’ She had heard that skolex worms—giant, predatory, sand-worms—did something similar to ease their movement through the ground, deep in the Tataroc Desert.
The unnatural foreboding dropped away, replaced by a real and present dread that needed no augmentation and was all her own. Her skin prickled and the air felt thicker with every breath as he glared at her, already gaining control of his breath.
“I found you,” he said.
Siobhan gritted her teeth as helpless frustration burned the back of her throat. ‘What am I supposed to do against Thaddeus Lacer!? This is just unfair.’
