Marked by Magic (The Baine Chronicles #4)(10)

“Excuse me, Miss Baine,” the librarian said in a firm but friendly voice. “Is there anything I can help you with?”

“Oh!” I turned around to look at her, a little flustered that she knew me. The nameplate on her desk told me her name was Janta Urama, and that she was the head librarian of the Palace. A prestigious position… was she sitting at the reception desk because her staff was off fighting the Resistance? Her middle-aged appearance was unusual for mages, who could assume youthful beauty whenever they pleased, but perhaps she cared more about research and learning than her looks. “Umm…” I scrambled to come up with something, because Iannis had told me of his Tua heritage in confidence, and I did not want to accidentally reveal that to her. “The Chief Mage sent me here. He wanted me to research gulayas, as part of my apprentice training.”

“Gulayas?” The woman’s steel grey eyebrows rose in surprise. “That is advanced magic indeed for an apprentice in her first year of training.”

I forced myself not to fidget underneath her searching gaze. Before Argon Chartis, the renegade mage who’d signed up with the Resistance, had used a gulaya to escape Iannis’s wrath, I’d never even heard of them. It figured that they’d be an obscure subject. “Yeah, well, we came across one during the recent rescue mission, and I wanted to know more about them. So he said I should look here.”

“Ah, I see.” The librarian’s face cleared, and she stood up. “We have an excellent encyclopedia of magical items that should have the information you need. Come, right this way.”

She led me over to a low shelf that was fitted directly into the wall beneath one of the windows. The shelf was filled with a series of white, leather-bound books with the titles stamped on the spines in gold – twenty-six volumes total, one for each letter in the alphabet. Carefully, she selected the ‘G’ volume, then placed it on a bookstand on top of the shelf and opened it to a specific page.

I sighed as I scanned the small print. I knew it was the right entry because at the top of the page was a stylized drawing of a gulaya that looked very similar to the star-shaped object Chartis had used to vanish before our eyes. But the text was written in Loranian, the difficult language of magic I was still trying to master.

“It’s all right,” Janta said, noting my dismay. “I’ll help you.”

Slowly and patiently, she helped me translate the text. I was able to read every fourth word or so, and between the two of us, I worked out what the encyclopedia said. Some of it I already knew from Iannis – gulayas were anchored to the location where they had first been activated, and the wearer could use them to teleport back to that location so long as the gulaya was charged. They would activate on command, or in some cases automatically if the wearer were in deadly peril. The encyclopedia cited a mage who had been carried back to the nursery at the age of seven by a gulaya, when a grizzly bear was about to bite her head off. However, several centuries ago, gulayas had gone out of fashion because charging them required a two-day ritual after each use, and a single mistake in the execution of said ritual meant you had to redo the whole damned thing. Even worse, the ritual involved a rare plant called grusia that only grew in a mountainous area located between Sandia and Garai, and its sale and export were illegal in most countries.

“Why is it illegal?” I asked Janta.

“Because grusia is more commonly used in death spells,” Janta explained. “Mostly by witches, of course, as they tend to rely on plants for their magic more than we mages do. The Federation banned the plant nearly three hundred years ago, when the Minister at that time was assassinated through a death spell that involved grusia.”

“Makes sense.” I shuddered a little. “I didn’t know death spells were a thing.” I mean, maybe in the back of my mind I knew it was possible, but I’d never really thought about it.

Janta smiled a little. “I’m afraid you’ll find out that all sorts of things are possible with magic, both good and bad.” She turned away, gesturing for me to follow her. “Come. We have several old gulayas in the library’s artifacts collection that I can show you.”

She led me to a back room lined with shelves filled with containers of varying shapes and sizes. They were all carefully labeled, but when I tried to read some of them, I found, to my frustration, that the labels were written in Loranian. Dammit. I really was going to have to master the language sooner rather than later.

Humming a cheerful tune under her breath, Janta scanned the shelves until she found a long, rectangular metal box. As she touched it, runes flared to life, glowing bright blue and red. I squinted against the glare, my eyes having adjusted to the dim interior of the library, while Janta murmured a few Words. There was a loud click, and the runes faded as the container unlocked.

“Here we go,” Janta said, carrying the box to a table in the center of the room. She opened it and pulled out a smaller box from within labeled “Gulayas”. Inside were seven of the silver, star-shaped charms, most of them as big as my palm, but some of them smaller.

“Oh, this is terrible,” Janta cried as I laid the last one on the table. She was scanning a long piece of paper. “One of the gulayas is missing!”

“Somehow, that doesn’t surprise me,” I murmured, picking up each piece in turn and examining it. They smelled like magic, but very faintly, as if only traces remained. But one of them, a small one that was little larger than a gold coin, smelled more strongly than the rest. Was there a chance that it might still be charged? How long did it take for a gulaya’s charge to wear off naturally?