A Practical Guide to Sorcery

Siobhan

Month 9, Day 12, Sunday 3:25 a.m.

Siobhan turned to run, and Thaddeus sprinted after her. As she had guessed before, he was quicker. His legs were longer, and each step propelled him forward with more strength. She managed to get the second fleetfoot potion up to her lips and drink it without choking, but that only let her slightly exceed his speed.

“Titans damn you, Siobhan,” he cursed in a low voice between gasps for air.

For a moment, she considered switching into her other body. It might fare somewhat better against Thaddeus. But even now, she hoped to preserve that identity’s safety. There was still a chance she would get to use it again. If she could break line of sight from him a second time, she might be able to switch and then pretend that she was somehow, actually, Sebastien. Who was in the tunnels either for a legitimate reason or via some nefarious magic of the Raven Queen’s. And the Raven Queen herself, nowhere to be found. ‘We seem to have switched places!’ she imagined saying.

Siobhan shook her head. How likely was a ruse like that to actually work? At the very least, it would make Sebastien more suspicious. At worst, Thaddeus would dig deeper and realize the great deception she had been pulling off—that Siobhan and Sebastien were like a change of clothes, each housing the same being.

Beyond that, she would need to find a place to wash up, switch outfits, and possibly deal with any new injuries that came from physically ripping through her clothes, all of which were currently sized for a significantly smaller body. Even if she wanted to, there was no time.

Thaddeus ignored the veil of shadow trailing behind her, simply pouring so much light into the darkness that she couldn’t absorb it all.

Despite skidding around corners and fleeing with a reckless abandon that eventually led to her coming into another cave—this one a dead end—she didn’t manage to lose him.

Siobhan stumbled to a stop, her legs trembling, her teeth clenched around the light coaster. She let it fall into her hand to better gasp for air. Darkness encroached on the edges of her vision as she swung the light coaster around, trying to find a way out. She almost missed it at first—a hole toward the back of the cave, near the ceiling. Luckily, there were minimal barriers between it and her across the floor, but she would have to climb the wall to reach it. Everywhere her light had passed, hairy moss on the cave walls and floor seemed to have captured some of the light, glowing gently.

However, it was too late. Thaddeus had caught up.

Siobhan tucked her spell rod back into the holster sown into the inner back of her dress along the curve of her spine. With her hand free, she drew out her battle wand from the holster on her thigh. She fired without checking the spell currently selected. A trio of slicing spells shot out, one at the center and two curving in through either side. This wand was filled with some of the most powerful battle spells legally available, enough so that she had winced when buying it, due to her history of somehow losing every single battle wand she got her grubby mitts on.

Without even a blink or a twitch, Thaddeus threw up an instant, effortless shield that blocked all three slicing spells. His nose had stopped bleeding, but there was obvious bruising beneath his eyes already, and some crusted blood around his nostrils and in his mustache. “I apologize for underestimating you,” he drawled. He was breathing hard, but clearly less winded than her. His stamina was better than hers, too. “A sleep-based spell, on a master of shadow and nightmare? I should have known not to attack you within your own domain of expertise.”

Siobhan ignored him, switching to a concussive blast spell and throwing a couple of those as she backpedaled to put more distance between them. She put the light coaster back between her teeth, illuminating the upper half of her face from below while a thin strip of shadow over her eyes kept her from blinding herself. With her now-free hand, she scooped up a rock.

Thaddeus’s shield absorbed the first spell, and with timing that must have been born from long experience and exquisite reflexes, he dropped the shield spell, lifted the hand with the beaded bracelet once more, and cast a roiling, purple-tinged spell, then brought the shield spell up again just in time to catch the second concussive blast.

Thaddeus’s purple counterattack spell was so efficient that it barely glowed, but Siobhan’s eyes were still well enough adjusted to the dark that she could clearly make out its writhing edges in the split second that it shot toward her.

Her warding medallion screamed with sudden cold, and the combination of fleetfoot potion and the much longer-lasting quintessence of quicksilver allowed her to take a single, small step to the side.

She cringed from the combination of freeze-burn on the delicate skin of her chest and the instinctive fear of that hungry magic, lifting her arms to brace around her head. The attacking magic slid off and to the side, and a piece of her warding medallion broke. She could tell because of the sudden pause in its sinking temperature, and the way the purple spell seemed to stutter as the force driving it away gave out.

“So, that was your free-cast deflecting spell?” Thaddeus asked. “I am pleased to see it in person. Very smooth,” he praised.

Siobhan had almost forgotten about the warding medallion—a reminder that the quintessence of quicksilver only gave the illusion of omniscience. ‘Why didn’t it activate against Thaddeus’s attack before?

It was telling, though, that Thaddeus didn’t imagine that her own defense could have been based on an artifact. Just because none were visible and her clothing was obviously too poor of a quality to carry any powerful magic didn’t explain it. He had a blind spot toward her, an expectation that she was competent. She wasn’t sure how she might use that misconception against him.

Siobhan darkened the thin strip of her shadow to protect her eyes from flash-blindness as she switched the spell on the battle wand again, and then again half a second later. This time she shot out a huge ball of fire packing a massive blast in its center, followed by a flare of lightning that shot right through its center. The fireball disguised the lightning, which in turn destabilized the fireball, exploding it slightly early and continuing on to strike at Thaddeus while he was hopefully off guard from the explosion.

Finally, she hurled the jagged rock she had picked up earlier with so much force she almost cracked a tooth against the coaster. It never even hit Thaddeus’s shield, slamming instead against a secondary shield that sprang up a few inches in front of the first.

Siobhan’s thoughts stuttered in confusion, but she had no time to wonder. The shield blinked back out of existence, as if it had never been there. ‘Of course he would have a basic automatic defensive artifact, you idiot!’ she scolded herself.

With her free hand, she reached into her satchel, hooked a vial of acid and a vial of liquid fire between her fingers, and then hurled them both at Thaddeus with enough force to break the delicate glass.

Without waiting to see the result, she switched the wand’s current spell again, and this time sent out a barrage of stunning spells, hoping that, at the very least, some of the soporific powder contained in the spell would get past Thaddeus’s shield.

The fact that he wore no obvious or excessive jewelry that could store spell charges was a mark of confidence more than modesty. He could cast anything he needed, and would be able to access the Red Guard’s supplies during the rare occasion that he went up against something truly dangerous. But a basic defensive artifact against things like thrown stones would catch the sort of random, mundane attacks from commoners that might take him by surprise, or that someone like her might try to slip past a more arcane-focused defense. However, if she cracked a vial of acid or liquid fire over it, it might allow the liquid through while stopping the shards of glass.

In truth, she didn’t have much hope. While a single shield that defended against everything was almost impossible to make, most of her offensive options were rather mundane and relatively low powered. They weren’t meant to deal with a Grandmaster who could probably have been certified as an Archmage if not for politics.

When the crackling, red light of the stunning spells faded, she saw that the stone was scorched and cracked around Thaddeus, liquid fire smoldered at his feet, and dust filled the air. But the man was still standing, completely unharmed. Rather than the shield she had been expecting, he had created armor for himself. It reminded her of a dark, smoky chitin, except that it glittered scintillatingly. Smooth lines covered his entire body in articulated segments, which came to blade-like edges at his shoulder and knees.

Thaddeus swiped a hand over his face, and the plate there grew transparent so that she could see his expression in the eerie green glow of the moss that had been enlivened by her light show and the flames on the ground. He raised one eyebrow. “Are you underestimating me?”

Siobhan bit back a scoffing laugh of despair. A physical suit of armor rather than an actively cast shield would mean that he could take blows that he would normally have had to stop attacking to deal with. Whatever substance he had made it from, whatever clever internal structure it used, his armor could deal with fire, force, lightning, acid, and seemingly protected against particulate substances and poison, too. To add insult to this, he had gone so far as to add artistic flourishes to make himself seem more menacing. ‘Is he holding back?’ A small part of her sparked with twisted, bitter hope. ‘Trying to give me a chance to escape, maybe? Or maybe he just wants a good challenge.’ Whatever the case, she would take any advantage she could get. “Please let me go,” she asked, imbuing her voice with as much sincerity as possible. “I won’t ever tell anyone what I discovered. I can swear a vow to it, if you want. Does the Red Guard really care about this so much? What does it harm if I know the truth? We’re already allies, Thaddeus, please.”

Begging was revolting, and for a moment she thought she might actually gag, but her pride was worth little against stakes like these. Even if she knew the begging wouldn’t save her, as it never had. She would take any chance she could grasp, no matter how slim.

Thaddeus’s eyebrows scrunched together in an expression of pain. “I wish it were that easy. Unfortunately, I do not make the rules, and I cannot stop what has been set in motion. But I promise you again, when I defeat you, I will not kill you. If you give up fighting, it will be gentle, and as painless as I can make it.” He pointed one armor-covered index finger at her and another spell shot forward. This one screamed, like invisible lightning, and seemed to crack through the world in much the same way. Unlike lightning, it was slow enough that she had time to backpedal and dodge to the side, but it seemed to be drawn to her with some sort of homing function.

As it approached, the medallion began to draw in heat again, and Siobhan gritted her teeth against the cold burn. She wished there were some way to feed the artifact heat like she could feed blood and power to her divination-diverting ward, but unless she wanted to take it out and risk it being forcibly removed from her possession, there was no safe way to do so. Burning herself with fire was as dangerous as with cold. The crackling attack slid around her invisible, slippery ward and tried to come in from the side, so that the deflection had to keep turning to match it.

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A scream of pain slipped past her clenched teeth as the warding medallion literally froze the skin and cloth in a small area around itself. She scrambled to put physical distance between herself and Thaddeus’s spell, just to buy a few microseconds of reprieve.

Thaddeus frowned as he followed the magic’s path with his gaze, a hint of strain in the fine wrinkles at the corners of his eyes.

‘He’s directing it.’ Siobhan reached into her satchel and drew out a philtre of shadow-perception.

She took a sip, then dashed it on the ground between them as she backpedaled from the inexorable, screaming spell. Clouds of darkness exploded outward but did nothing to obscure her perception. If anything, the temporary ability to parse all the information her senses were giving her might give her an extra edge. She tucked the light coaster away in a pocket. Unfortunately, the lack of sight did not seem to hamper Thaddeus nearly enough, or perhaps the homing function was built into the spell, after all.

In desperation, Siobhan brought her shadow up and sank it into the crackling, screaming battle spell like an enveloping maw, with the intent to rip from it whatever power drove it. She was not able to absorb the spell itself, but the barrier of her shadow did seem to work to cut off whatever was connecting it and Thaddeus.

As with divination, an actively cast spell like this required a source of power, even if she couldn’t see its path or trace its flow.

Thaddeus gasped and stumbled, wide-eyed.

Without him, it expended itself on ripping apart the clouds of magical darkness within a few seconds, while Siobhan took the time to slip away unseen. Not toward the hole at the back of the room that seemed to lead to a tunnel just big enough to crawl through. Thaddeus was too clever not to have noticed it already. Instead, she moved toward the side of the room, where she had seen an outcropping of stone a few meters above head height, just wide enough to lie on and be partially hidden. While she moved, she took more potions from her bag and downed them, one after the other. Bark-skin, to add some protection to her flesh. Feather-fall, to ease the climb. A draught of shadowed concealment, chugged to the last drop. An aptly named sticky-fingers salve, good for just thirty seconds. The last had two common uses—pickpocketing, and burglary. It allowed her to grip the cave wall well enough that, with the feather fall, she could climb up the side like a lizard.

Her mentor righted himself, the fist holding his Conduit pressed to his chest and his face twisted with shock and suspicion as he looked around blindly for her. “What was that? How did you do that?” The words were gritted out between clenched teeth, his voice tight.

Siobhan remained silent as she settled onto the ledge, pressing herself fully into the hard stone. She pulled the spell rod out again and lined up a few battle potions by her stomach with careful, precise movements, fighting the desperate urge to pant for air.

Thaddeus cast a gust spell so powerful that it picked up the shards of the philtre of shadow-perception and the remnants of unexpanded liquid still pouring from it and buffeted it all toward the back of the room. The clouds of darkness escaped through the tunnel near the ceiling, confirming for Siobhan’s benefit that they were, in fact, traversable, though it would be an uncomfortably tight fit even for this body.

Siobhan’s ears popped at the sudden change in air pressure, and even though she was on the edge of the spell’s effects, she pressed her no longer sticky fingers to the ground and closed her eyes at the sudden fear she, too, would be blown away. The feather-fall potion’s magic faded even as the gust spell died down.

All of the potions seethed in Siobhan’s stomach, urging her once again to vomit, and a hot wash of horror chilled her skin. If Thaddeus had hit her directly with even such a basic spell, she probably would have been blown across the room and bashed against the wall. Bark-skin wasn’t enough to protect against such a blow. Her warding medallion might not be, either.

As the wind died down, Thaddeus looked around the cave that had been flash-cleaned with narrowed eyes. He brought up his light orb again, doing a full, careful spin, and then dropped the light to send out a wave of divination that she very carefully ate with her shadow as it washed over her. It went on for a while, long enough that her quicksilver thoughts had time to spin.

‘What horrible wrong turn did I make that put me here, at this moment, in this situation?’ Her memories flowed like liquid, and she concluded that this was inevitable since she had first gone to visit Thaddeus in his cottage. She had become too comfortable with him, felt a little too safe. She knew the kinds of things the Red Guard did to protect their secrets, and yet she’d somehow failed to internalize that Thaddeus, too, was an agent. Siobhan squeezed her eyes tight in regret and shame at her own stupidity. Even if she’d decided to ask him for the truth, she could have done so in a safer manner. The same way she had gone to treat with the other Red Guard agents.

‘Do I have any options right now if he doesn’t just give up and walk away? If he finds me?’ She had over twenty minor spells in her spell rod, and she could detach their output to fight with them while simultaneously continuing to hide her physical location. But she couldn’t see even those that were meant for battle instead of just general utility—a drilling spell, for instance—doing much harm to Thaddeus. Would an unlocking spell make his armor fall apart? She doubted it. Even if she could come up with something that could get past his armor, he could cast a shield even faster than she could attack. She had more battle potions with various effects, but none of them seemed likely to be effective.

She had left the emergency copper coin with the tracking spell in it behind, but even if she’d had it, she doubted Sebastien’s safety would come before the compulsion of Thaddeus’s vows.

‘Ah! I should have reminded him that the Red Guard gave me the authority to do restricted research!’ Except…he had been there for that agreement, which had been pretty specifically about shamanry. He knew about her expanded leeway, and it wasn’t enough to stop him from being compelled to kill her. She believed, at least, that if that knowledge would have loosened his vows, he would have drawn upon it already. He didn’t want to kill her. Just scrub her brain with a metaphorical scouring potion.

If only she had that promised rare component that would help her modify the dazzler, she could possibly just erase the last twenty minutes from Thaddeus’s mind and fix this whole thing. The idea filled her with vindictive satisfaction, but she quickly brought herself back to reality.

The gesturan spells she knew were far from developed enough to be useful. Sitting around casting for several minutes just to launch a fist-sized clod of dirt or ball of water was a terrible idea. At Siobhan’s current level, that kind of magic was only good for surviving the type of emergency that didn’t require any fighting.

Her only advantage over Thaddeus was that he could only do one thing at a time. He could switch between spells slightly faster than her, but that didn’t make up for his limitation. If she added on the possibility of attacking with an artifact, potion, or even a physical blow of some sort, she had a chance to hit him—but she had nothing that could get past the armor.

She briefly considered trying to carve out a piece of the ceiling and drop it on him while he was distracted.

Her disadvantage was that if he found her, a single spell from him could end things.

Thaddeus drew in a long-suffering breath through his nose, then winced and lifted a hand as if to touch it, though he stopped himself halfway.

Another flash of warning rose up from the back of her mind. She didn’t need to interpret the memories to know that Thaddeus didn’t really think she had escaped and was going to cast some kind of revealing spell. Based on his prior success, it was likely he would try something that she had no defense against.

All she could do was misdirect and deceive, and so she needed to do that better than she ever had before.

Before Thaddeus could finish preparing his powerful spell, she dropped a thread of shadow down the side of the wall in front of her, ran it over to a spot a few feet behind Thaddeus, and lifted it into an imitation of herself. She made the false fabric of its skirt and the tips of its hair cold enough to waft fog, and despite his armor, Thaddeus noticed almost immediately.

He whipped around to face her shadow, and Siobhan took advantage of his movement to snap open one of the segments of her spell rod without being heard. The illusion spell drawn on it was vague, so that she could use it for quite a lot with the right application of Will.

The problem with illusions was that they had no shadow. They were all light, and even the more complex ones that could block out the sight of whatever came from behind them looked unnatural, visibly ephemeral and a little too glowy. She had practiced adding shadow to her illusions when she made Theo’s birthday present, the illustrated book telling of his adventures with Empress Regal. Since then, she hadn’t gotten nearly enough practice with illusions to be comfortable enacting her current plan. But she had been practicing magic all the time, including the incredible detail that any truly lifelike illusion required.

And so, now, she brought all of her concentration to bear and added a second, detached-output spell where the face of her shadow form hung in the air. From within the lightless dark, her face appeared, as if rising to the surface of a sheet of water. Its eyes were closed. Every lash was drawn in shadow and light, her skin scattered with pores and faint texture, and the sweat beaded on her upper lip and around the edges of her hairline reflected light from the moss and still-burning liquid flames.

Siobhan watched intently, wishing she had the eyes of an eagle so that she could see her work in more detail. Her quickened thoughts ceased to feel like enough, and the rest of the world fell away as every part of her mind and Will poured into creating something even realer than reality.

Her illusory form’s hair and clothing remained a midnight void, as if only the face were peeking out from an elaborate costume, which wafted with fog and fluttered in an illusory wind. She knew her own face better than most, perhaps, due to being able to take it on and off and having spent so much time disguising it to look like other versions of itself. She poured in everything she knew about it, even the scent, the way breath felt flowing through her nostrils, and the exact way the world faded from sight every time she blinked. These were not visual, and shouldn’t have mattered for a simple illusion, but they were real, and she had learned that such things mattered when practicing magic.

Thaddeus’s eyes were wide, and rather than attack, he took a single step back.

‘This is where reputation comes in handy. If it were Sebastien doing this, Thaddeus would look for more reasonable explanations instead of wondering what strange magic I’ve cast.’

Thaddeus regained his composure quickly and cast a probing attack.

Siobhan’s illusion twirled out of the way with unnatural, fey-like speed, then immediately fell still again. Looking up through its lashes in a way that was more menacing than flirtatious, it gave him a slow, mocking smile.

Behind Thaddeus on the other side, Siobhan sent down another few dozen threads of shadow. These, she formed into ravens, and sent them flying through the air in a complex pattern. Of course, they made no sound, but Thaddeus somehow noticed and half-turned his head to see them out of the corner of his eye.

While turning, he stepped carefully to the side and backed up so that he could see both Siobhan’s illusory form and the whirling mass of ravens at once.

She let a few, frost trailing from the longest and sharpest edges of their wing feathers, swoop in a little closer to Thaddeus as if threatening him.

It was a true testament to his wariness that he didn’t immediately attack, instead saving his magic for defense.

After a moment, when the tension was reaching its peak, she sent her illusion “running” back to the entrance of the cave, while the ravens coalesced into an almost indistinguishable mass and flew through the tunnel on the other side.

Thaddeus looked from one to the other and then let out a deep sigh. He lowered his head and reached up as if to pinch the bridge of his nose but ended up knocking his hand into his armor’s face plate. After a few seconds, he turned and walked after her illusory copy.

Still lying up on the ledge within the cave, Siobhan remained still and silent, wrapped in a thin shell of her shadow just in case she needed to immediately devour an attempt to scry her. Minutes passed, and she continued to send her shadow outward in either direction, using what she could sense through it to direct it. If the stone turned to liquid again, she would stay perfectly still and hope that it didn’t react to her.

Enough time passed that the potions she had taken, except for the much longer-lasting quintessence of quicksilver, began to wear off. The sweat cooled on her skin, and her shadow stretched far enough that she had to stop and let it return to her body.

‘Am I safe?’ she wondered. Some part of her wanted to keep hiding here, but another part of her considered that Thaddeus might retrace his steps if he couldn’t find her.

Siobhan sat up, and her instincts screamed a warning like a half-remembered daydream, as a small sound against the stone behind her warned her to turn her head.

Thaddeus stood over her, taking up the small remaining space on the ledge, and she had no idea if he’d been there all along, invisible and silent, or if he had stepped out of the stone wall at that very moment.

Surely, if it were the former, she would have noticed his presence? He was breathing hard, and a sheen of sweat coated his temples and the sides of his nose. With the quintessence of quicksilver, even the tiniest hints could be analyzed and reveal relevant information. The hair on her arms would have shifted, or a waft of his scent would have slipped through.

He had left his armor behind somewhere. Perhaps it conflicted with the spell that allowed him to travel through stone. So, as he crouched down over her, she could hear his low murmur clearly.

“You are very clever, and very skilled. But I know your love for tricks, Siobhan. If the test is set by you, given two answers to choose from, the third will always be correct.”