A Practical Guide to Sorcery

Chapter 246: Perfidious

Thaddeus

Month 9, Day 12, Sunday 4:00 a.m.

Thaddeus panicked when Siobhan seemingly threw herself to her death, just for a moment. Despite knowing that she was a powerful thaumaturge, some instincts were hard to break.

Soon after she began to fall, she had taken out that strange pseudo-tome that Sebastien developed and sprouted ephemeral wings of condensed air. They were cast weakly but were enough to slow her.

Just as she had begun to show a hint of gliding rather than merely falling, Thaddeus reached out and again cast the spell to create a line between them, as he had done only seconds before to pull himself up through the stone. Thaddeus braced himself for the discomfort, set himself as the anchor, and yanked her toward him. With the help of the spell, both distance and the intervening matter were shunted aside, replaced with a small pocket of space sourced from one of the beads on his component bracelet. The space could not touch the rest of the world, and the rest of the world could not touch it, not even with gravity or friction. Only magic could pass through, which made it somewhat ineffective as even a short-term shield.

Her natural magical resistance was not enough to stop him, and without inertia to slow or endanger her, she arrived within grasping distance in a quarter of a second.

The effort of the spell drained Thaddeus’s second-to-last beast core. Though he was almost exhausted from the series of powerful spells he had been casting for the last fifteen minutes since she disappeared, first to find her again, and then to catch her, he quickly followed up with a paralysis spell. He was sure to cast one that had nothing to do with sleep, shadows, or anything else that might be within her area of expertise.

She crumpled to the ground, her eyes glaring up at him like two black coals even as her face went slack.

Thaddeus followed the paralysis with several different incapacitating spells, put her directly into a coma while bypassing sleep entirely, and then tied a complex wire frame around her hands and each of her fingers so that they could not move or curve into a Circle.

It had been a while since he pushed himself to the edge of his capacity like this, not just in power, but in complexity. He spent a lot of time practicing to grow his Will, of course, but his stamina was most efficient at about seventy percent of his maximum performance. Anything over that, and he burnt out quickly.

Against most enemies, he still would have come out on top, but she had almost escaped. If he had been just a few seconds slower, or if she had jumped and flown off a little sooner, he might not have managed to catch her due to sheer fatigue. Or, he would have run out of beast cores, which would have handicapped his ability to power his spells.

He opened his eyes, checked his work, and pulled the strange expanding spell array device and her Conduit ring from her hands. Her fingers were so slender, and her hand was so much smaller than his. Somehow, lying still like this, her entire being seemed smaller than he remembered.

Thaddeus looked for a beast core, but either she had dropped it somewhere over the edge of the cliff, or she had been pulling from some other source of power. Thaddeus briefly contemplated this implausibility before setting it aside. Beast cores were valued for a reason, but there were always other potential sources of power, if one had the Will to utilize them. Using the material of the cliff, he molded a sarcophagus of stone around her. If she were to wake somehow, which would normally have been out of the question—but with her, still seemed a distinct possibility—he was not entirely sure if his efforts would hold her.

He then cast half a dozen divination spells on her just to ensure she showed no signs of suddenly springing to wakefulness. Moderately reassured, he cast a cleaning spell on her body to get rid of the traces of both their blood. Very carefully, he followed this up with a mild healing spell, just in case she had gotten more injured than he realized during their battle.

She had again passed up the opportunity to try to kill him. She wouldn’t have succeeded, of course, but she hadn’t even tried when he seemed at his most vulnerable.

He could not be sure if she had still been pulling her punches at the end. Some of the abilities she had displayed were nothing less than Grandmaster-level. That knife should not have been able to pierce his defenses. And after that, the spell he had cast to hold the blade in place within his knee had been ignored entirely, as if he were pouring energy into a bucket with no bottom.

He could not help but think of Myrddin’s famed void shield, though he reminded himself that the mechanism between the two feats could be entirely different.

He recalled the cloak-shaped gateway into darkness and amended his earlier estimation of her power. Perhaps she had even reached Archmage-level.

That contrasted against the low-powered dazzler, which seemed a strange coincidence. Had she been mocking him with the choice? The spell could have been learned on her own, true, but he also considered the possibility that she had been watching when he taught Sebastien, or perhaps picked it up from the young man later. Had it been some kind of message? Its secret purpose was to erase memories, after all…

If so, he could not parse the hidden meaning, but it left him feeling vaguely uneasy. He had not seen Sebastien for a while—longer than Thaddeus had expected Sebastien would be able to stay away, even with the gesturan primer and sound spell to occupy him. What had Siobhan been doing with the young man during that time?

With a deeply weary sigh, Thaddeus picked up her understated purse, cast a levitation spell on Siobhan’s sarcophagus-entombed body, and began to walk toward his cottage while she floated beside him. He strongly suspected that the cloak-shaped gateway had been a function of her shadow spell, though he remained unclear on the details. She had been swallowed up by it and disappeared from the world entirely, not a trace of her or the spell itself remaining. It did not seem to be a planar portal—how would she have contained the spillover energy while free-casting? It also was not a fabled teleportation technique—she had been gone for some time, he believed, and then been caught again shortly after returning.

If he had to guess, she was either traveling as a shadow, or perhaps somehow through the spirit realm, though he was not sure how that would be possible with a physical body. Could she have dispersed and remade her flesh? Somehow shielded it? Thaddeus shook his head and forced himself to stop speculating. He had too little information about that spell. There might be some other option he failed to even consider.

He sighed and looked wistfully at her face, the only part of her left free from the stone. He wished he could ask her about these things, but after he was done, she would not remember, and he would not be able to explain how he knew.

One of the most common mistakes that even intelligent people made was the inability to change their minds when presented with new evidence. Thaddeus had previously stated quite firmly that it was foolish to believe she might be a witch, and the shadow-creature a powerful demon familiar. He had believed her when she claimed to be a sorcerer.

But he noted that all the most powerful abilities she displayed tonight had been related to the shadow, even from the beginning.

That was further evidence that he had missed something important. How was she able to cast a Grandmaster or Archmage-level spell with that Conduit? Did she have another, hidden somewhere? Surely even she would not have cast through her own body.

The shadow had been the spell she used to sever one of his attack spells from his control. It had also seemed to become her, for a moment, a fey, entrancing being of half-flesh, half-shadow, though he now suspected that had been some kind of illusion.

Later, though, it had managed to injure him with a very physical attack, before attempting to worm its way inside him. Intimately aware of the effects this had had on Mr. Jorgensen, the former Pendragon Corps member, Thaddeus had responded with alarmed fury. He believed he had managed to harm the…shadow-familiar. For that was what she called it.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

Thaddeus let out a low chuckle. Siobhan had a reputation for truthfulness. Obviously, she had outwardly trivialized the utility and danger of that spell to the point of outright lying. He distinctly remembered her calling it “harmless.” But at the same time…could she have been offering the plain truth to their faces?

Because if she were a witch as well as a sorcerer, it would explain a lot about her strangely lopsided abilities. But how could she have possibly contracted something so powerful? Had Raaz Kalvidasan known how to create a hereditary binding? There was a reason no sane person contracted a familiar magnitudes more powerful than themselves.

Or perhaps she was not a witch, but something new? Something that would explain two Wills within a single body, and all the clues about her that didn’t fit together. Something that would explain why, when things got truly serious, the shadow so often took Siobhan’s own form? What if the Raven Queen had always been a shadow?

“Stop speculating,” Thaddeus reminded himself. Sometimes, it was hard not to let his thoughts run away with themselves, even though he knew that people, including himself, were prone to filling in missing information in ways that supported their conclusions, rather than the truth. It was only that so little about Siobhan Naught made sense, he could not help but try and fit the pieces together and fill in the blanks. “The simplest explanation is almost always correct. I am confused, and I do not understand. The only thing I can truly anticipate from my past experiences is being surprised,” he reminded himself, a small chastisement for his wild, fantastical theories.

Thaddeus opened the door to his cottage and guided her carefully over the threshold. He had no way to learn the truth. Obviously, nothing she said could be trusted. He wondered if she had lied to him at other times, about other things, too.

It was still possible that her abilities seemed so lopsided because of heavy specialization and a lack of well-rounded education. Or that she knew she had less readily available power sources than Thaddeus, and was saving it all for her final escape attempt.

He settled her with a gentle thud on his living room floor, then pushed the furniture toward the walls to clear space. He disintegrated the stone around her and sent it out of the cottage, then stared down at her peaceful, barely breathing form. His lips moved against his will, as if to say something to her insensate form, but no sound escaped.

Apologies were useless, and he would not insult her with them, even if she would never know. He had gotten himself into this situation when he got involved with the Red Guard. Despite all his painstaking work to loosen the shackles of his vows, this particular issue was not an area where he had succeeded yet, and thus he had little choice.

Thaddeus was a slave. The thought sent a white-hot bolt of rage through his brain, and he had to take a moment to breathe with his eyes closed before he could continue. He repeated his earlier divinations to ensure she was not somehow near to waking, then retreated to the side room for several restricted components and a potion that would keep her in a coma for the next few hours.

As he began to prepare the spell array, he considered stripping and searching her, as was standard safety protocol with prisoners. The vow did not force him to do so. He decided against it. She was incapacitated, and the idea of her lying there naked felt somehow distasteful, like plucking the feathers from a beautiful bird. Some part of her dignity would be lost. What he was doing was already bad enough.

Mind-altering spells were some of the most difficult magic Thaddeus knew. Before casting, he took a moment to set aside the small part of him that was still violently, wrathfully fighting back against the compulsion of his vow. There was no room for internal conflict. For what came next, his performance needed to be perfect.

Thaddeus tore a hole in the barrier of her mind as if he were slicing open the belly of a rabbit to expose the organs. Then he reached in and grasped for the conversation that had started this, the question that should never have been asked. It was a struggle to connect his own memory of that moment to Siobhan’s, as her mind writhed and fought against him like a panicked, rabid animal fighting against the snare. But once he had the thread of the memory, he could follow it to all the pieces that connected to it.

This spell did not allow him to see what those memories were, only that they lit up when the memory of her question was stimulated. Truly accessing another person’s memories, by necessity, required one to experience them. Connecting two minds like that was dangerous for both parties, and in his current state of relative fatigue, especially so. He did not have to, and so he did not.

Thaddeus found it helpful when casting this spell to visualize thoughts as a web, though such a simplistic representation was by nature incorrect. Memory connected to memory, but also to personality, and to the Will. It was impossible to excise the Will from a living being, and he did not want to purge any part of her identity.

Therefore, he was very careful as he pulled on the memories, stripping them from their fellows, all the way back to the source. Several times, he was forced to pause for fear of damaging her, as her mind, still strangely agile, began to tear itself apart in her desperation to resist him.

Her struggles were exceptionally powerful, and several times, he almost thought they would cause him to lose control of the spell. If given enough time, she might have even overcome the potion he fed her earlier, well before her system had physically processed it.

Despite the trouble she caused him, Thaddeus admired her tenacity. This was the kind of mind that created an unparalleled Will.

Nevertheless, by working and resting bit by bit, like reeling in and giving line to a fish until it exhausted itself, Thaddeus prevailed. He loosed his grip on the spell and looked up toward the ceiling, still kneeling beside her insensate body. Sweat dripped from his face and soaked his clothes, despite the weak temperature-controlling spells embedded in his jacket.

He knew that it was likely a certain kind of person would eventually come to ask the same questions again, but he refused to go so far as to try to strip the curiosity out of her. If events one day replayed themselves, hopefully by then he would be able to make his own choices.

He stood up, drank, and ate—and took a peek in her purse while he recuperated. There were a few standard supplies, but he suspected there was more he could not access. If he wanted to spend the time, he could break into it, but it would make keeping Siobhan from becoming suspicious more difficult. With a sigh, he returned to cast a second spell, this one to twist her thoughts and hide the fact that he had removed memories.

This spell was similar to the first, but dealt with creating connections and healing rather than carving away slices and slivers. He wove her mind and memories together around the hole he had created. Each thought that might otherwise have led to the realization that something was wrong, he bent around the edge of the hole and connected to another mundane thought.

The process was complex, and he was forced to adjust his weaving several times as certain thoughts and memories refused to bind properly to each other.

Even now, Siobhan fought him, though more feebly now that she had forgotten what was happening, who was doing this to her, and why. Her thought web was peculiar—less fluid than most, yet with more connections than normal. Perhaps it would lead to a strange form of creativity based on widespread experience rather than the more typical intuition. It certainly made reconstruction difficult.

But Thaddeus was persistent and meticulous. When he was done, the hole, empty of gleaming strands of memory, was left only with the faint ghostly shimmer and shadow of the underlying parts he could not remove. Otherwise, it was clean work. The wound was patched and would heal fully with time.

Finally, Thaddeus cast a spell to create new memories. Many among the Red Guard found this the most difficult, and it was because no two minds were alike. People were prone to noticing when a thought did not sound like their own or when memories felt alien. However, Thaddeus had a way to get around that.

Using one’s own mind against them required fourth order connections and a delicate touch, but given the slightest suggestion and a few nudges, people were incredibly good at filling in the gaps. He believed it was a design flaw in the brain.

This meant he could not definitively and precisely control what she filled in the gap in her memory with, only push her in the right direction and provide key points for her to latch on to. But whatever she created, it would feel natural to her.

When it was done, he gave her a healing potion, carried her back down to the base of the white cliffs, and laid her gently on the ground. He put her ring back on her finger and her Conduit in her pocket, then fixed the damage that her clothing and other belongings, including her strange spell stick, had sustained. He cast a spell to detangle her hair.

He hesitated for a long while. Procrastinating, really. Finally, he walked over the bridge to the place where she surprised him earlier that night. From there, he free-cast a spell to wake her.

She gasped like a corpse risen from the dead, mouth gaping open, chest arched up as her fingers scrabbled at the fabric over her breasts as if to peel everything back until she could tear at her own heart.

Thaddeus sprinted to her side and free-cast a general-purpose healing spell on her, one that would forcefully calm her body’s signs of panic. He knelt on one knee and caught her confused, fearful gaze. “I deeply apologize, Siobhan.” His voice cracked, and he paused to swallow. “I attacked on instinct when you surprised me.” He ran a hand roughly over his face and said truthfully, “This has been an incredibly trying day, and I am on edge. But that is no excuse.”

He remembered belatedly that he should have questioned her about the source of her knowledge, and barely held back an expression of triumph at his successful evasion of the Red Guard’s geas. He had managed not to think about it for long enough, and it was too late now. And this was one more small sliver chipped away from the walls of his prison. He had time, and he had the Will. One day, he would be free entirely.

Siobhan looked wildly around with wide eyes, settling slowly as she seemed to piece together what had happened. She nodded, and in a hoarse voice, said, “I bear at least half the blame. I cannot believe I thought giving a bit of a scare to Thaddeus Lacer was a good idea. Though whatever you cast, I am surprised you managed to take me down before I could react.” She gave a tight smile and sat up. “This is a bit embarrassing.”

Thaddeus gave her a small, joking smile and helped haul her to her feet. “I promise not to tell anyone.”