A Practical Guide to Sorcery

Chapter 239: A Shroud of Lace

Siobhan

Month 9, Day 12, Sunday 1:00 a.m.

Siobhan stopped on the wide street in front of the canal entrance through the northern white cliffs and looked around for anyone out late enough to notice her.

Pain prickled up through Siobhan’s shoulders, into her neck and the base of her skull. With a wince, she rolled her neck and rubbed at her muscles, trying to relieve some of the tightness. Her eyes were dry and faintly gritty, but neither blinking nor yawning soothed them. It had been a week already since she refreshed her sleep-proxy spell, and the fact that the fatigue was slipping through so clearly showed Siobhan just how far she still needed to go to catch up to Liza’s skill. ‘All the stress today was as bad as casting for a few hours straight. And it wasted my time and kept me from actually casting the sleep-proxy.’

She resolved to do so in the morning, after she got back to Liza’s and had a chance to take a nap. ‘Next time, I need to refresh the spell earlier, before it gets so strained that I need to rest first.’

Siobhan crossed the street, and over the bridge at the base of the cliffs, and then passed under the towering white stone. When she got to the place where they had convened before, only Kiernan was there.

He had been pacing back and forth, and jumped when he noticed her, then nodded formally and put his hands in his pockets. After a second of silence, he pulled his hands out of his pockets and instead crossed his arms.

Siobhan eyed him curiously, but when she determined he had no intention to speak, she turned to press her back against the wall and closed her eyes. After a few minutes of waiting for Thaddeus, her scattered and anxious thoughts grew too uncomfortable to remain cooped up with, and she turned her attention to her shadow instead. First, she practiced sensing through it, which had grown much easier than when she first attempted it.

She made it harder by sending it back the way she had come, and then around a few corners, over the bridge, and into an alley on the other side of the street to explore around. In the past, she wouldn’t have been able to do this. Originally, she couldn’t send the spell around blind corners or beyond the range of her vision. She wasn’t sure why it was easier now. ‘It could be that I’ve memorized so many of the details of the city that my grasp on its location remains firm. But it’s probably the fact that if I can see with my shadow where it goes, I do not need to see with my eyes to direct it. Very useful.

Kiernan was staring at her. His eyes slowly trailed down to her feet as her shadow returned to pool around her. “Is…something wrong?”

“No, I was just scouting a bit.”

Kiernan nodded, and then kept nodding for a bit too long, still staring at her shadow. “Yes, yes. Well…it’s just a bit unusual to watch.” He hesitated, then added, “Is it true that you can travel through it?”

Siobhan tilted her head to the side. She could cover an area with it and then walk through the darkness to appear elsewhere, but she was mostly sure that was not what he meant. “Not in the way you think,” she said. There was no point in making herself seem less impressive or powerful, not when the Raven Queen’s reputation had become such an asset for her. ‘Sometimes fate works in ludicrous ways,’ she mused.

Next, she brought up a delicate filament of her shadow to hang in front of her and began to weave it into a lace-like pattern, growing ever-outward from the center like the facets of a snowflake. She added more filaments, working faster and faster until she had filled the air in front of her from ceiling to ground with a beautiful shroud. Once, such fine control would have been difficult, but now controlling her shadow was almost as easy as thinking, and the only difficulty was keeping the design firm in her mind. Honestly, at this point, she was unsure how to continue improving the shadow-familiar. ‘Maybe I can try to absorb other types of energy beyond light and heat. It’s not a built-in function of the spell, but neither was sensing through it.’

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Kiernan had retreated further into the tunnels and was pacing again. The sound of his footsteps scraping the white stone and his absentminded sighs were irritating her.

Siobhan paused her lacework and spun toward the old man. “Why are you so agitated?” she snapped.

Kiernan stopped. At first, his gaze avoided hers, but he steeled himself to look directly at her. “I am merely concerned about the late arrival of our third colleague.”

Siobhan’s eyes narrowed. “Truly?”

Kiernan swallowed heavily. “Yes?” When she continued to stare at him silently for an uncomfortably long moment, he grew more tense until seeming to pop like a balloon. “I am under a lot of pressure recently.” Siobhan only had to remain silent for a few more seconds for him to elaborate. “Desperate times make for strange bedfellows.”

Siobhan wasn’t sure who he was alluding to. ‘Me?’ she wondered. But that seemed unlikely. Someone new. Someone from one of the Thirteen Crown Families, perhaps? Based on the goals of the Architects of Khronos, she could see why Kiernan would be conflicted about allying with someone from the group that they wanted to overthrow.

However, if that was the case, it wasn’t good for her. The animosity between two of the strongest factions in Gilbratha was part of what had created a safe pocket for her to exist within. If they allied, then without the incentive to keep the other side from gaining control of her—and her knowledge—she could be put into a situation with no safe exits. “If you take a viper to bed, do not be surprised if you wake up to a bite,” she warned. “That is the viper’s nature.”

Kiernan’s face crumpled into an exasperated frown. “I know that. But I am not in a position to unilaterally make decisions.” He glanced back at the lace shroud, grimaced, and said, “I believe Professor Lacer may not make it tonight. I will take my leave rather than continue to wait. Until we meet again.” He bowed, then scurried past her, edging around the construction of darkness and out toward the street where the transport tubes waited.

Siobhan considered, but then decided to keep waiting. She pretended to grab the shadow lace with her hand, forcing it to drape like actual fabric, which she threw around her shoulders like a cloak. Then, she sent an undefined blob of it to the mouth of the cave system so that she could monitor the street. While keeping this stable in the back of her mind, she bent the other part of of her Will to practicing small gesturan spells.

Doing all of this at once was quite a stretch for her. Even with the ability to split her Will, each part only had so much available concentration. She couldn’t keep track of any details while sensing through her shadow so lackadaisically, but she would at least know if anyone walked by.

The primer she had found, and which Thaddeus had then gifted to her, contained the most basic of exercises. Gesturan magic was heavily based in the elements, and so there were three exercises for all five. The movement to create a ball of water was different than a ball of fire—which made a lot of sense when she thought about it in terms of Natural Science. She was about halfway through the primer, and could gather all five base elements and shape them into a ball. She could then sling that ball around her body before shooting it off with a thrust of her hand for all of the elements except Radiance and Fire, neither of which would naturally cohere and then stay together when launched as easily as Water, Earth, or even Air.

Based on the drawings, the final set of exercises dealt with forming the element into a flat cylinder and then exploding it outward, but she hadn’t gotten to that yet. Perhaps after a couple more weeks of practice.

Even these, the most basic of exercises, took a long time to cast and a precision that the average person apparently found difficult. That was inconvenient in a way, but they didn’t require any components, not even chalk or a place to draw a Circle. ‘I wonder if learning different crafts like this helps me get closer to free-casting. After all, I am training myself not to fall into any particular ruts in my casting process.’ Modern sorcery, esoteric spells, alchemy, and Gesturan spells all had their own process to access the fabric of magic and call forth a response.

As for the spell Professor Lacer had gotten her personally, she still had yet to make much progress on it. It allowed one to create sounds, with great variety and control. Hypothetically, she could create the sound of an instrument, or an explosion to knock out someone’s eardrums, or even mimic her own voice. As of yet, she could barely create some hair-raising, eerie, off-tune screeching sounds.

Her greatest feat was a simple tapping that reminded her of a pebble falling onto stone, which was a big improvement over some haunted violin’s wail of sorrow and hatred.

Movement on the street caught the attention of the part of her Will that was idly watching, and she dropped her attempt to turn her pebble sound into a more hollow drumming. A few people had passed so far, but this time, it was finally the one she wanted.

Siobhan stepped out of the shadows of the cliff cave and waved to him.

He tensed and spun to face her between one step and the next, his Conduit somehow in his hand.

Siobhan let out a small snort. That was Thaddeus Lacer’s version of tripping or jumping in surprise.

He looked around, then made his way toward her, by the water’s edge. “I was busy with our response to today’s Aberrant. I assumed neither of you would wait for me.”

“Kiernan has left already. I waited because I wanted to talk to you about something different,” Siobhan said. For some reason, her heart began to race at the words, like it was a prelude to confessing some terrible secret.