The jail guards tried to raise some kind of fuss, but I couldn’t pay that any attention. Her scent was on the wind again.
I started walking, trying to take in as much of it as I could, but it was maddeningly faint.
Which made sense.
My sister had been dead for seven years, and swallowed up by the earth for every one of them.
I don’t forget scents though.
Especially not hers.
I didn’t understand how her scent could be in a city we’d never traveled to before, but I knew what I had to do to find out.
Behind me, Doxle was keeping pace and, puzzlingly, keeping silent.
He’d dealt with the jail guards, I think, and then caught up to me but wasn’t asking any questions or making any observations. I’d know him a handful or minutes or so and already that seemed out of character. From how he’d acted in the cell, this was a demon who loved listening to himself talk.
I drew in some more breath and noticed that I couldn’t smell anything of ash or lightning.
He was hiding his scent? Did he know what I was searching for?
Another breath and the thin threads of scent that I’d been following frayed into dust.
She wasn’t nearby. Not on this street, or even in this neighborhood. Probably in the city though. Probably still in the city in fact. The scent had the hint of a few bright, crisp notes left, as though it had traveled to find me, rather than lingering and turning sour as the stinks and vapors of city wrapped around it and dragged it into the general mush of sweating people and rotting food remnants.
I didn’t run after the last wisps of the scent. Not as a human, and not on all fours. Instinct drove me in that direction, but I knew it wouldn’t help. The scent wasn’t acting like a proper one should. It was her scent, I was sure of that, but I was also sure there was something unnatural about it too.
I finally stopped beside public laundry and let my shoulders slump in defeat. Trina hadn’t gone into the laundry, the scent was still too distant, and it vanished on its own, not giving way to the sharp sting of soap.
“Would you care for some food?” Doxle asked. “I can’t imagine they fed you particularly well for the last two days.”
For a moment, I’d forgotten he was there, so I turned to face him a little faster than I’d intended. It probably made me look like a frightened little hare. I’m not fond of being mistaken for a prey species, but I kept the growl of surprise from my voice.
“Food would be good,” I said. I’d been starving even before I got to the city gates, Being thrown in jail hadn’t improved that since my jailer hadn’t fed me poor quality food only because he’d saved on the effort and simply not fed me at all.
I considered going back to extract the vengeance I’d originally intended to, but stayed where I was. I had shown admirable restraint so far though and didn’t want to break my current streak.
“This way then,” Doxle said and began walking down the narrower street that crossed the one we’d been on.
Freed from the spell of Trina’s scent, I was able to take in Middlerun for the first time.
That it smelled like something other than desperate and despairing humans made it infinitely more pleasant than the alternative I’d been ‘enjoying’ for the last couple of days, but as we walked the usual odors and aromas began to surface. The lye from the laundry blocked out a lot of them until we were a few streets away, but roasting spiced meats can cut through a lot of other scents, and the omnipresence of the smells of the varied dishes left me shaking with a hunger that I’d largely stuffed to the back of my mind while I was in chains.
I caught a whiff of ash and lightning a few times as we walked and noticed Doxle twitching his fingers in the air as we walked. Small trails of sparks in different hues followed about half of the movements he made, though they didn’t lead to any flashy magical effects from what I could see. He was mumbling something to himself too, but I don’t think he was speaking either the Imperial High Tongue or Low Speech. I decided it was probably some demon language, and that I’d have to deal with answering questions soon enough as it was.
That was fine. I had questions too, and getting me out of jail was worth at least a few honest answers.
Until he was ready to ask about whatever he wanted to know, or make whatever offer he planned to, I was happy to spend the time geting my bearings.
Middlerun wasn’t a city I’d been too before. Grammy Duella wasn’t a fan of cities in general, and tended to stick with visits to Glenhaven and Winterbridge, both of which were well to the east of Middlerun if her geography lessons were accurate and my memories of the trip here had been muddled by all the blows to the head I’d taken.
Neither Glenhaven, nor Winterbride had an Imperial Academy though. Middlerun did, and unless I missed my guess, the giant fortification on the hill on the northern edge of the city was the Academy, the garrison it supported, and Tower of the Divines which had roughly a thousand legends told about it.
I was supposed to go there, I’d had no interest in going there, but if Trina’s scent was strongest anywhere, it was to the north and that just couldn’t be a coincidence.
Doxle turned us from the side street onto one of the main roads through town, its broad stretch of cobblestones had been warmed by the midday sunlight that was able to shine down without being blocked by the tightly packed buildings we’d been walking past, making it seem a hundred times more inviting as a place to snatch a quick nap than any spot in my cell had. Of course the steady flow of traffic would make that challenging, the last two days had been miserable enough that I was more than half willing to try anyways.
“This should do nicely,” Doxle said, indicating the building to our left. All sorts of wonderful aromas wafted out of the door when a well dressed man and woman exited the main doors.
There was food in there.
And a lot of people.
The sign over the door read ‘The Golden’ in High Imperial. Like most of places that catered to the wealthy there was no pictography on the sign to indicate what the venue offered, which conveyed a very specific message to those who couldn’t read High Imperial without explicitly admitting to the establishment’s biases.
The food still smelled fantastic though.
Or maybe I was just ravenous from not eating.
An hour later I was less ravenous.
There were also six empty plates in front me of.
It occurred to me that while I was quite capable of eating more, stopping was prudent if I didn’t want to have deal with questions I had avoided answering for over a dozen years.
Seeing me pause, Doxle placed the tea cup he’d been sipping from back onto its saucer and leaned forward.
“I feel as though its impolite not to offer you a night’s rest as well but since time may be of the essence I hope it will not be too much of an imposition to resume our discussion now?”
“You were explaining what an Imperial Advisor was,” I said. He seemed surprised that I’d remembered that though he tried to hide it.
“Yes, though first there are some general points about magecraft I wish to make certain you’re aware of.”
I waited. Interrupting him seemed like a fantastic idea if I wanted the conversation to drag on for the next week. Not interrupting him, therefor, seemed like an even more fantastic idea.
“I will speak in broad strokes only,” he said. “Please be aware that nearly everything I am about to say is wrong, either in certain situations or for certain people. The study of the Transcendent Arts begins with broad truths though and the deeper one gets the more those truths give way to illusion.”
I hadn’t heard it phrased like that before, but the general idea of highly advanced magecraft being rife with uncertainty had been part of Grammy Duella’s curriculum.
“At their basic level, all of the Transcendent Arts, magecraft, alchemy, divination, arcano-technology and the others all start with power. What distinguishes the Transcendent Arts from Sublunary magics is where the power comes from,” Doxle said and drew a glowing circle in the air.
“Sublunary magic is the sort of minor casting any living creature can manage,” he said filling the circle in with a swirl of green light. “Its power is derived from our world. There’s no need to call it, or store it because we are suffused by it at all times. The principal difficulty with it is that because it is part of our world, Sublunary magic is bound by many of its laws. Despite being available in abundance, it is only capable of small feats and promoting natural changes.”
He drew a thread of light from the green swirl and drew a pattern within the circle, but since it was green on green it was lost almost as soon as he drew it.
“The Transcendental Arts do not suffer this limitation however. They draw on power from beyond this world.” With a flick of his finger he torn a thin slash into the circle, which began to fill with purple light.
“With magecraft we are able to create effects that are impossible according to the laws of this world.” He drew a thread of purple light from the slash and painted a symbol for eternity in the middle of glowing green circle. The symbol blazed there, neither mixing with the green light nor being diminished by it.
“Doing the impossible comes with many costs however.” He gestured to the circle where the slash of purple light was spreading deeper into it, until it touched the purple symbol of eternity and shattered the green circle entirely.
“Left unconstrained, Transcendental magic can not help but replace the laws of this world with the laws of the world it was drawn from,” Doxle said.
“Like the Reaving Storms,” I said.
“You are familiar with those?” Doxle said.
“Intimately,” I said.
“My condolences,” he said, because there were no good experiences to be had with Reaving Storms. “And yes. The Reaving Storms are uncontrolled manifestations of the power of the other planes which have collided with this one. We draw magic from those planes, but that is not the only means by which their power leaks into this world.”
“But only when the Soul Kindled Wards fail,” I said. This was territory I probably shouldn’t have been well versed in but it was an understatement to say I had history in this particular area.
“The Soul Kindled Wards do serve to contain the power leakage of the other planes, and when they fail calamities do tend to occur,” Doxle said, meticulously not saying something else though I wasn’t sure what.
“Advisor’s don’t make the wards though. That’s the nobles’ jobs,” I said, trying to see why he was explaining all this and how it might be relevant to me.
“True. Our role is more specific,” Doxle said. “The natural leakage from the planes is only one means of unearthly power being drawn into this world. Each and every practitioner of the Transcendent Arts draws on that power too. For most, the amount they can call forth is trivial, and even the amount they can store up within themselves offers no danger to the world at large, even when it’s sufficient to destroy them utterly.”
“Some can draw in more though,” I said, seeing at last where this was leading.
“Some can draw in much more,” Doxle said. “For most of those, training begins at a very early age. For others, their potential ends at a very early age as the raw magic they contain discorporates them. Some few though survive without training and without destroying themselves. Whether it is luck, natural skill, or something about the nature of the plane they’re attuned too, they wind up possessing a fantastically deep Hollowing and the potential to be truly mighty casters.”
“Hollowings?” I asked.
“Its the term for the space within us where we hold the magic of the planes we are synched with.”
“And I’m one of these people with deep Hollowings?” I asked, suspecting that the truth was rather different, and hoping that wouldn’t be obvious or detectable.
“Oh you’re more than that,” Doxle said. “You have a fantastic Hollowing unless I miss my guess, but more importantly you have a natural, almost inborn capacity for wielding those magics.”
“Why do you say that?” I asked, feeling more exposed than I had in years.
“When we met, your face was a mass of bruises and your nose had been broken in two places,” Doxle said. “In the short time we’ve been together those wounds have vanished. In point of fact, they were mostly healed by the time we exited the jail.”
“I’ve always healed fast,” I said, understating the truth it by several orders of magnitude.
“A useful trait,” Doxel said. “Also evidence to suggest that you can use your magic on a subconscious level. That’s not common for form shifters, but its not unheard either. The speed and ease with which you manage it however is impressive.”
“So then I’m fine?” I asked, still not seeing exactly where he fit in.
“No,” Doxle said. “You have been fine, but you are unlikely to remain so for two specific reasons. First, drawing magic from another plane, any other plane, requires a transmutation of the mind. When we reach out from the reality we know into an unreal one, our minds transform to hold them both. Some call this ‘enlightenment’, but ‘madness’ is a much more accurate description. We build shapes with words, and gestures, and materials to force our minds to retain a shape that can exist in this world but any failures can break that connection, sometimes temporarily, other times not.”
“But that’s never been a problem for me,” I said.
“And with training, it may never need to be,” Doxle said. “It’s only when people are pushed beyond the limits of their skill that they tend to make grave mistakes in channeling their magic. Which leads us to the other reason you are likely to encounter difficulties going forward; if you could leave here and live a quiet life in some little cottage in the woods, you might never need your magics, but with power such as you possess, the Great Houses are going to take an interest in you, and their attentions will ensure that your life is the furthest thing from quiet that you can imagine.”