The Spell Realm (The Sorcery Code #2)(25)
“That would be amazing,” Gala said eagerly. Of all the feats she’d done, she had the least understanding of how she’d been able to get herself from one place to another in a blink of an eye.
“Great.” He smiled. “Before we go into the details of the actual language, let me tell you the spirit of what you would be doing. You need to be thinking of the world surrounding you as a set of coordinates. Think of the three-dimensional space around you as little cubes or spheres, whichever suits you, and establish a mathematical convention for naming each location.”
Gala visualized a grid ahead of her, picturing the meadow covered by evenly placed, tiny pebbles, where each pebble had its own unique name. The names were not fancy: pebble one was next to pebble two and so on a million times around the area of the meadow. She could also easily picture a whole meadow filled up with these imaginary pebbles and name them around the volume of the space. If she wanted what Blaise called a coordinate, she just needed to name the right pebble.
“I have it,” she told him. The entire process took her only moments.
He raised his eyebrows, looking impressed. “I was just beginning my explanation.”
Gala grinned at him. “Well, you can move on. I understand these coordinate things.”
“All right then, teleporting requires you to pick a coordinate you want to end up at. You need to plan your spell carefully. If you are going someplace outside your line of vision, you had better plan for what happens if there is an object already at that coordinate. That’s why long-distance teleportation is so dangerous.” He took a breath, then continued, “You need to picture your own body split into the same sub-units as the coordinates, so you can specify exactly the space you will occupy when the spell is done.”
This also made sense to Gala. She imagined her own body made of pebbles. If she wanted to put the pebbles that made her body somewhere, she needed to decide which pebbles it would displace. She nodded to show her understanding.
“When all that is done, you use the words that someone had already invented for this task, and just fill in the variables that I explained. This is a simple task, because you’re not inventing a new spell. Someone, long ago, already did that. You’re just tweaking it, so it works the way you want. And then you just need to say the Interpreter spell—”
“What exactly is the Interpreter spell?” Gala interrupted. “I know you’ve mentioned it before . . .”
Blaise smiled. “Well, I can explain to you what it does, but I can only guess at how it does it. From what we understand, it takes the logic of the spell and transmits it to the Spell Realm in some form—and then the spell acts upon our Physical Realm.”
“I see,” Gala said thoughtfully. She had more questions, but those could wait for now. “Can you please teach me what to say for the teleportation spell?”
Blaise proceeded to give her a language lesson. It was long, but Gala found every aspect of it fascinating. Blaise kept saying how amazingly quick she was to pick up all of the nuances of the arcana and how she was leapfrogging years of study. Gala accepted his praise with pleasure, even though this way of doing spells didn’t appeal to her as much as doing them directly.
The language itself was very natural to her. It was precise and logical. There were things like conditional statements—if A is true, then B follows—that existed in regular speech. However, with verbal spells, these statements had formal definitions and always had to be spoken in a specific way. There were a lot of words for formulas and quite a bit of formal mathematical constructs with their own version of grammar.
After hours of drilling, Blaise decided she was ready.
Closing her eyes, Gala recited the spell, followed by the Interpreter litany. It was supposed to teleport her a short distance. When she was done speaking, she opened her eyes and saw that Blaise’s face was much closer to her. Before the spell, they were sitting about an arm’s length apart, but now her knee was touching his. Even though she had planned it exactly this way, the sense of wonder was overwhelming.
Filled with joy, Gala looked into Blaise’s eyes. He held her gaze, and she could feel the growing connection between them. The joy immediately transmuted into something else—something that only Blaise could make her feel. Her heartbeat picked up, and she unconsciously moved toward him, her body beginning to ache with a strange longing.
“Gala . . .” There was a soft, deep note in Blaise’s voice. It made her skin prickle with heat, as though she was burning from within. “Are you sure about this?”
Gala stared at him, and then, without saying a word, she placed her hands on his shoulders. “I’m not as na?ve as you think,” she murmured before pressing her lips to his. She could hear the catch in Blaise’s breathing, and then he encircled her in his arms, pulling her into his embrace and deepening the kiss. The fire burning inside Gala spread until she couldn’t think, overwhelmed by the sensations. The intensity of her feelings was too much, too sharp, almost as it was when she lost control before . . . and then she suddenly felt unbearable heat—heat that was coming from outside herself.
Gasping, she drew back . . . and saw that the meadow around them was ablaze.
She must’ve accidentally set it on fire.
Chapter 14: Barson
“I hear you thought I was dead?” Barson said, stepping forward when Augusta just continued staring at him, seemingly frozen in place.