Raven's Strike

If he hadn’t been an illusionary construct, if he weren’t the only hope she had of saving Tier, she would have done something unpleasant to him.

She started trying to reconstruct the next random assortment of squiggles and angles.

Hi

She jerked her face out of his grip and tried again. Rhythm, tone, pitch, pronunciation, no wonder solsenti wizards were a nasty bunch.

Staring at the meaningless shapes she’d drawn on the table, she once more focused all of her attention on getting the words just right. It sounded to her exactly as it had the first twenty times, but this time something happened. Magic rushed through the chalk marks and into her in a stream of power that pushed the stool she was sitting on back a few inches.

It was different from the runes. The runes were hers, and they did as she bid.

The shapes and words of this kind of spell weaving distracted her, then stole her magic and twisted it into a new shape. She didn’t like it—a Raven controlled her own magic. She didn’t like it, but she saw and understood the pattern the symbols and sounds were trying to make of her power. There were flaws here and there, and she fixed them as she tugged her magic until it was once more hers.

“I’ve got it,” she said, turning to Hi

But instead of the half-grown Traveler boy, she saw instead a net of magic, a complex pattern of strings and knots that gave form to the Scholar. The violet fabric she’d always seen as the Raven Order was there as well, beneath the netting—or so she thought at first. She got up from her chair and walked toward him. She could see now it wasn’t the same as the Order, not quite.

“It’s not the Raven Order, but it is akin to it,” she said.

“I was goddess-touched,” he said, seeming to follow her meaning. “The gift of the Raven is very like the Raven’s Order. What did you do? This magic doesn’t feel like the spell you were working on should!”

“I fixed it,” she said, bending closer, fascinated. “Pardon me,” she said absently, as the reality of what she saw began to give meaning to the passages Hi

“What did you do?” Hi

“Not right now,” she said. “Let me look.” It took concentration, as if she had to pay attention in order to focus her eyes on anything. It was draining, too. She wouldn’t be able to do this for long periods of the time. It was akin to the way Ravens looked to see Orders, but it went deeper.

“I see the spell binding you to your illusion,” she said after a moment of thought. That must be what the net that encompassed the rest of him was. “Beneath that the—Raven’s touch, I suppose you’d call it—and under…” The violet sheathing became transparent, fading from her view as she chose to look at different things. “I see a bluish light and a dark core beneath.”

“Describe it to me.” Hi

Seraph lifted up her hand and pushed it through the net to stroke the light with a fingertip. “Give me your hand,” she told him. If his goddess touch worked like the Order, she should be able to show him what she had done so he could do it himself. It would be easier than trying to explain it to him.

It was her turn to be the teacher, and she hadn’t forgiven him for grabbing her cheeks.

He took her hand, and for a while she wondered if his not-quite-an-Order, his not-quite-human, and his not-able-to-work-magic were going to hinder her.

She found out quickly that he was right about the magic, but if she split up what she wanted to do, everything worked. She showed him the form of the magic she used for this new, extended vision, and though he couldn’t work the magic himself, she knew from his “Ah” of pleasure, that he understood. Then she showed him what she saw, the same way she could have shown it to anyone, even someone who didn’t happen to be mageborn.

She took him slowly through the net of his magic and past the Raven’s touch and brought him to the pale blue fire surrounding a darker form.

“The light blue is spirit,” he said. “That’s what you needed to be able to see. I have no idea what the other is… soul? Perhaps. Or perhaps it is something that has happened because I’ve kept my self in this form…” His voice trailed off.

She closed her eyes and separated her magic gently from Hi

While Hi

His expression returned to alertness with disappointing speed. When Tier had that look on his face, it took him much longer to return to his usual quick-witted self.

“How would I know?” he asked. “I’ve been here since the end of Colossae.”

“Not quite, I think,” Seraph said. “There was a Shadowed with the wizards who survived, and the stories tell us you are the one who killed her. So why are the Shadowed evil?”

She should probably have left the questioning to Tier, but the expression on Hi

Hi

Something of that determination must have been on her face, because Hi

“What caused it?”

“We did. I did.” Guilt was one of the expressions she’d seen on his face quite often, given she’d only known him for part of two days. “It took me a long time to figure out what happened.” He sat on a bench, his head bowed. “I had been experimenting with an illusionary form that not only reproduced an object perfectly to all the senses, but could be set into a silver object to be called and recalled without degrading the illusion.”

“The mermori,” said Seraph.

Hi

“Forming the mermori destroyed the wizards’ houses.” Seraph rubbed her forehead, which ached from the spelling she’d been doing. “Since it took little power, it was not such a big thing to work it into the Raven’s spell, and you formed the mermori at the same time the city fell. The sacrifice wasn’t perfect because the wizards’ houses weren’t part of the eternally preserved city.”

“And then there was the library,” Hi

Seraph rubbed her forehead harder. “Stupid.”

“Yes.” Hi

“You were going to tell me why the Shadowed is evil.”

“A wizard—not just any wizard—but a powerful, smart, well-schooled wizard, can under certain circumstances slip through the hole in the veil and touch the power of the Stalker, can touch destruction. Being destruction, it kills any mortal being who holds it for long.”