The Spell Realm (The Sorcery Code #2)(31)
*
Regaining her senses, Augusta opened her eyes, feeling the burn of tears. She hadn’t known that Blaise had captured the memory of their engagement; he must’ve been recording it without telling her. She recalled that he did have a big bag with him that day, but she hadn’t known he was lugging around the new Sphere his brother gave him.
The ache in her chest was almost unbearable. For a moment, she felt like she had lost Blaise all over again. Seeing herself through his eyes had been devastating. In recent months with Barson, she had managed to convince herself that she was fine, that she had moved on from the wreck of her eight-year relationship, but the truth of the matter was that she would never be able to fully erase Blaise from her memories.
Getting up, she walked over to the window, gazing out at the streets of Turingrad far below. She could feel her cheeks getting wet from the tears running down her face, and she wiped them with the sleeve of her silk dress. More than ever, she wished that she could go back in time and undo everything that had happened in the last two years, but that was not even a theoretical possibility.
She had to live with the consequences of her actions . . . and so did Blaise. She couldn’t let her emotions get in the way of doing the right thing again, no matter how much it hurt.
Blaise’s creature could not be allowed to live, and this memory changed nothing.
Chapter 17: Blaise
At Blaise’s request, Liva took them to a more deserted part of the mountains. It was a safety precaution on his part—he did not want Gala to accidentally destroy half the forest with some spell gone awry. He didn’t explain his rationale, not wanting to hurt Gala’s feelings, and he knew she thought that he simply wanted them to enjoy the scenery—which did turn out to be truly breathtaking.
It took them about an hour to fly there, and Blaise used the time to teach Liva how to operate the chaise. As he’d suspected, she was a quick learner, mastering the new oral spells with ease. By the time they arrived at the location, she was directing and landing the chaise on her own, reveling in the freedom of using sorcery out of sight of her fellow villagers.
Gala sat quietly on the trip, seemingly absorbing the sights. As they got deeper into the mountains, the green of forest and grass was replaced by the yellow and orange of naked stones. The wind also picked up, blowing from the ocean side.
“The storms are more likely to reach here,” Liva explained when Blaise questioned her about the strange-looking rocks. “And even when it’s calm, like today, the winds tend to be pretty fierce, stripping away all life from these rocks over time.”
As they approached what looked like a large gash in the ground, Liva directed them to fly lower. They were going to a canyon, Blaise realized as they descended. Up close, the canyon was massive. The mountains were like walls, rising up all around them. It was desolate and majestic, and all three of them were silent as the chaise touched the ground, awed by the magnificence of nature.
After they explored the area a little, Blaise began his instructions. “I am going to teach you a very basic elemental spell,” he said, looking at the two women. “You will manipulate the power of fire, the way our apprentices usually do.”
Gala and Liva nodded, watching him intently.
“First and foremost, I need to teach you the language for written sorcery. It’s similar to the verbal arcane language—you still have the conditional statements that you both know—but it also contains some powerful extensions and mathematical constructs that don’t exist in the spoken language. This, for example—” he drew a symbol for loop on the card, “—is a repetition construct we call the ‘loop.’ It allows your spell to repeat an action many times without having to write it out more than once.”
“So it lets you say ‘do this one hundred times?’” Gala asked, looking fascinated.
“Yes, but it also lets you say things like ‘Raise the temperature of this water by one degree until it starts boiling,’” Blaise explained, and wrote out the spell version of what he just said. It was much more elegant and precise on the card than it would be if spoken.
For the next couple of hours, he continued going over the basics of the language, explaining how to use formulas and calculations on paper instead of doing complex math in one’s head. They took a short break to eat some of the food Liva had brought, and then Blaise continued the lesson.
“There are two paths to every spell,” he told them. “The hard way is to start from scratch and specify in code exactly what you want to happen. There are infinite ways of doing that, just as there are infinite ways of writing a poem using words. It’s also very time-consuming. An easier way, the way I am teaching you today, is to use something someone had already written in the past and modify it for your own purposes.”
Liva frowned. “So does that mean a commoner could learn to do some spells by just copying the symbols without understanding them?”
“Yes,” Blaise said, trying to hide the bitterness in his voice. “That had been my hope originally—that the Interpreter Stone would allow people to do this. But unfortunately, it didn’t quite work out that way. Theoretically, one could indeed do a spell by just copying something already in existence, but it still requires access to an Interpreter Stone—and the Council doesn’t let that happen.”