Heretic Spellblade 2 Read online

  “If you’ll shake on it.” Nathan’s lips quirked, and he reached out with a hand.

  She frowned at his outstretched arm. “This isn’t some stupid dog joke, is it?”

  He blinked. What?

  Seraph explained, “Foxes are dogs, and some in the Federation find that hilarious.”

  “No, it’s not a joke. It’s a handshake.” Nathan couldn’t believe he was explaining this.

  Really, people actually thought of mystic foxes as dogs? Leaving aside their mass of tails, that seemed like a good way to mysteriously disappear, given the leeway foxes had in the Federation.

  Narime took Nathan’s outstretched hand, her grip light and awkward.

  “I’ll organize neutral territory to meet in,” Nathan said as their hands fell to their sides. The two of them remained standing. “But you’ll need to ensure that the Federation takes this seriously, and that this takes place before the end of winter. Once spring arrives, I’ll have no choice but to resume the war. I am a Bastion of the Anfang Empire, and my duty is to protect the eastern border. I won’t allow Torneus to stall me.”

  “Even if that means countless people die?” Narime asked.

  “Do you really think fewer people will die if Torneus gets his way?” Nathan said, pushing the Torneus point harder. “The only thing more damaging than war is a war that nobody has planned for. Just look at what’s happening between the Empire and Trafaumh right now.”

  Nodding cautiously, Narime let the topic drop. She left in short order and with a short bow. Sen reappeared, standing outside the room. She gave Fei a questioning look, but the catgirl ignored Sen and remained inside the room.

  That suited Nathan fine, as he needed to debrief Seraph. Fei had a role in guarding the fortress, and she was his most trusted Champion. He dismissed Sen, and she escorted Narime to a room in the castle.

  When he turned back, the schnaps bottle was missing from the table. Seraph shut the cabinet doors. He hoped that she had tucked his cognac away properly.

  The glasses remained on the table, although only his glass had anything left in it. He knocked back the remaining dregs and dropped it back on the glass tabletop with a clink.

  Seraph waved a hand around the room and held her other against her ear. Understanding her point, Nathan double-checked the protections on the room.

  Each room was magically warded to prevent eavesdropping. At the same time, it was possible for Narime to pierce them if she tried. Nathan couldn’t sense anything, even with the aid of the binding stone, so he had no choice but to assume the wards were working. Or perhaps Narime wasn’t attempting to eavesdrop.

  Being caught spying on your host was a grave insult at best and was grounds for expulsion or worse, most of the time. Narime surely sensed the protections on the room. She had been offput by the protections around the binding stone and would have been on high alert. Hopefully, that would prevent her from prying and putting him in a difficult position.

  “We’re fine,” Nathan said. He wandered over to the window. He couldn’t see a thing out of it due to the ice covering it.

  “What do you plan to do about her?” Seraph asked.

  “See if she can organize negotiations between us and the Federation.”

  There was a long pause. Nathan wasn’t facing the women in the room, but he imagined they were looking at each other in disbelief.

  “You have two duogem Champions from the Federation in your fortress. This is an opportunity you’re not going to have again,” Seraph said. “Jorin’s wounded, which means Narime is vulnerable. If all of us strike at once during the night…” she trailed off.

  Nathan turned to face Seraph with a flat look on his face. “Then she teleports away and we lose a valuable opportunity to either weaken Torneus, or convince Narime that she’s wasting her time.”

  “So, you are trying to convince her to join you,” Seraph said. “Why are you so interested in her?”

  Seraph’s face was expressionless. The same couldn’t be said of Fei, who was openly pouting.

  “Because she’s a powerful mystic fox with considerable knowledge of magic and the world,” Nathan answered, telling a half-truth.

  “No sexual interest at all?” Seraph teased.

  Ignoring the jab, Nathan continued, “We also need allies if we’re going to stop the Federation in the long-term. Didn’t we agree that any peace treaty would be temporary, given Torneus’s ambitions?”

  “We did. I also think you’re underestimating her.” Seraph bit her lip, which was an unusual expression for her. “You’ll dislike this comparison, but…”

  “But?”

  “But you and Torneus are similar in a lot of ways, and the way you tried to play Narime reminded me a lot of him,” Seraph said.

  Nathan nearly reeled from her words but kept his shock from showing on his face. Or at least, he thought he did.

  “I said you would dislike it,” Seraph said with a shrug.

  “I don’t think Nathan’s bad,” Fei muttered, glaring at Seraph.

  “He’s not bad. Sometimes being the big, bad manipulator is necessary. But Narime’s an old fox. She’s going to react poorly to somebody trying to manipulate her. Unlike us, she’s here for the sake of others. Torneus being a bastard isn’t going to make her turn on her race, even if the Federation has practically caged it.” Seraph shrugged.

  “She needs to feel that the status quo is more dangerous than change,” Nathan surmised. “And that we are the change that she needs in her life.”

  Seraph gave him an upturned look. “And you acted surprised when I compared you to Torneus.”

  Nathan winced and looked away, while Fei frowned. Maybe he was becoming more manipulative while he was here.

  But what choice did he have? Nobody knew the things he did. If he didn’t actively push people and events toward a conclusion he wanted, then the world would come to the same violent end he had already witnessed. And he had no guarantee that Kadria would—or even if she could—send him back in time again.

  He filed Seraph’s words away in the back of his mind, however. If he was changing, then that might make it harder to convince the women from his timeline to join him. Narime wasn’t drastically different. He saw no reason to rely on Kadria to convert him to his side.

  If he couldn’t find a way to bring one of his closest friends to his side, did he really have a chance to change the world?

  “We’re not hurting her,” Nathan said, bringing the topic back to its roots. “I imagine she’ll leave shortly anyway, given she needs to convince the Federation to meet with us. While she’s here, I’ll need you to stay at Gharrick Pass, Seraph.”

  “I was going to stay here whether you ordered me to or not,” Seraph said. “What Champion would leave their Bastion alone with two duogem Champions from another country?” Her eyes flashed.

  “Fei, you’ll be in charge of security,” Nathan said, ignoring Seraph’s words. The catgirl yelped at the sudden order. “Your flames consume magic, which means you can counter Narime if necessary. I doubt you’ll need to, however.”

  “Um, what about the knights and their training?” Fei asked, thinking about her orders from earlier.

  “You’ll need to manage both your knights and the security of the fortress. Sunstorm will be busy scouting for suitable locations to hold negotiations.” Nathan inclined his head toward Seraph. “I assume you’ll have no trouble if she’s your subordinate?”

  “Given I worked with her when I tried to kill you, no,” Seraph said drily.

  Nathan continued, “And Sen needs to focus on her sorcery. She still has a long way to go before she can match somebody such as Narime, and she can’t rely on gaining additional gems. That means you have a lot of responsibility, Fei.”

  Fei’s mouth repeated his last words, her lips quirking upward.

  “And how are we going to respond? Anna seemed convinced that the Emperor was ignoring this issue in favor of Falmir,” Seraph said.

  “The same w
ay I’ve dealt with everything political,” Nathan said with a grin. “By tagging in Leopold. I’ll have the old man pull his weight for once.”

  Chapter 8

  Contrary to Nathan’s belief, Narime didn’t leave the fortress. Instead, she sent Jorin, the male Champion who had accompanied her, back to the Federation in her stead. Then she made herself comfortable in the fortress.

  Narime’s tails became a familiar sight at meals. She cloistered herself in the library most nights, either reading or preparing letters.

  Despite the advent of the wireless and magical encryption, snail mail remained a popular form of communication. Many nobles had yet to install a wireless in their homes, or they lived too far from the leylines for reliable communication. This was rarely a concern for the military and those who lived in major cities, as almost every major fortress, mage tower, town, and city sat on top of a leyline.

  Magic had been the secret to humanity’s power since time immemorial. A leyline was as important as any river. Arguably more so, as mages could create water with magic, but the opposite didn’t apply. These days, the wireless only made leylines even more important. The immense power draw of magical barriers would only increase the strategic need for fortresses to be built atop leylines.

  But that was years in the future. Your average peasant didn’t even know what the wireless was. But a horseless mail carriage trundled through most villages regularly, collecting and delivering mail on a regular basis. The magical engines that powered the carriages relied on leylines, and their invention had drastically reduced the cost of transportation and mail delivery. The logistics of long-distance delivery of packages, letters, and other lightweight goods changed overnight.

  Most of Narime’s letters went into those mail carriages. One went through the pass daily, given how much communication took place between the Empire and Federation. Messengers on fast horses still had their place, but they were a dying premium service, promising same-day delivery over tremendous distances. Given the fastest method was to find somebody with the wireless, the day would soon come when only remote areas sent messages by horseback.

  Nathan doubted that all of Narime’s letters went into the mail carriages. She sealed her letters with magic, which prevented anybody from opening them and protected them from damage, but she had no way of guaranteeing they would be delivered. It would be trivial for somebody to ambush the mail carriage or stop the letter at the destination.

  In his timeline, her method for fast delivery had been to teleport the letters. But to do so, she needed to have intimate knowledge of both the destination and the person she was delivering it to. Maybe some recipients were in locations she didn’t know.

  Or perhaps she was trying to throw him off and the letters in the carriages were all a sham.

  It didn’t matter.

  What did matter was what Narime did at meals. She pestered Nathan with questions about the fortress, the magic he used, how he had built it so fast, and the spatial techniques he used. He hedged and dodged as much as he could.

  Every time he answered, he felt Narime growing more and more prickly, as if she was narrowing in on the fact that a mystic fox had taught him what he knew.

  Which was true, and the precise reason he was unwilling to tell her the truth.

  Nobody else intervened, and Nathan spent every meal with the silver-tailed fox by his side. It wasn’t the way he envisaged spending time with her, even if he did enjoy it in a way. He had missed her more than he had thought, and he sometimes fell asleep imagining her voice from earlier in the day.

  Today, he escaped her by teaching Sen a lesson out in the rear courtyard of the fortress. The training yard was full of soldiers. Their shouts pierced the chill, and the clatter of their weapons on armor was almost rhythmic. Fei and her knights were sparring somewhere in their midst.

  No doubt somebody was still building up the betting pool on how many days before one of the knights finally beat Fei in a spar. The catgirl was growing more and more cocky as she swatted her company of beastkin down time and time again, but her enhancement didn’t make her undefeatable. Eventually, she’d slip up and lose.

  Nathan had a small bet of his own on a couple of wolfgirls in her company. Capable knights often made good Champions, and if they proved capable, he’d begin training them himself. He kept his bets secret, however.

  Fei would take the revelation poorly if she found out. Also, the entire betting pool would be ruined once anybody found out who he was backing.

  Farther down the courtyard, Nathan, Sen, and Vera stood in a barren patch of dirt close to the wall. Trees creaked near them, their branches nothing but empty sticks given the time of year. The ground was stiff, but there was plenty of it and nothing flammable nearby. Enough room to use some spells without burning the fortress down.

  Nathan and Sen wore their uniforms and were dressed simply. As usual, Vera dressed up. Although it might be more accurate to say she wore her usual clothes. Her blue robe clung to her figure and would normally emphasize her plentiful cleavage. Today, her gleaming white jacket covered her up. Presumably, she felt cold. Her long red hair was tied back in a loose ponytail, which was a recent change.

  “Shouldn’t supercharging a spell raise it’s rank? I don’t get it,” Sen said, her tone huffy. “You say that a supercharged spell is roughly the same as a spell one rank higher. I even tested this with Ifrit and you’re right. So, doesn’t that mean if I supercharge a third rank spell, it becomes as fourth rank spell?”

  “The rank of a spell is typically used to measure complexity. Supercharging a spell doesn’t make a spell more complex, just more difficult to cast,” Nathan said. When Sen opened her mouth to protest again, Nathan raised a hand to stop her. “What’s one plus one?”

  “Two,” Sen said. She frowned.

  “What’s one hundred plus one hundred?”

  “Two hundred. The fuck are you asking this for?” Sen spat.

  “Language,” Nathan said.

  “You and Ifrit are both such old men,” Sen grumbled. “I swear you communicate telepathically. How else do you both bitch at me at the same time?”

  Nathan ignored her rising anger and continued his lesson. “Did it become more complex to add together a larger number?”

  Sen blinked. “Uh… I guess not? I mean, you gave me easy numbers.”

  “Then add together other ones in your head. The result is the same. Arithmetic doesn’t change just because the numbers become bigger. It just becomes longer and more tedious. That’s the difference between the rank of a spell and supercharging.” Nathan raised a hand, and two triangles appeared on each side of it. “Casting two of the same spell in sync to achieve a single spell of increased power doesn’t increase the complexity of the spell. But it is harder to do this. The same applies to when you cast several of the same spell separately.” Multiple triangles appear over his fingers.

  “Okay, I call bullshit on that.” Sen pointed an accusing finger at him. “I’ve been trying to do that for weeks now. Every single day, I try to cast more than two spells at once and I just can’t. It’s insanely hard. How do you even do that, and how can you say with a straight face that it’s not complicated?”

  Vera chimed in, “She’s right. Multicasting is quite hard. Supercharging is relatively easy, but multicasting involves directing the spells independently. It’s a difficult skill. It took me years to work out how to cast three spells using my staff. I can’t even imagine doing five at once using only my fingers.”

  “Hah, cornered.” Sen grinned at him. “So, why isn’t a higher rank of spell?”

  Nathan frowned. He hadn’t realized that multicasting was so difficult. He had struggled with the technique when he was younger. But it was a vital battle skill. Many spells that affected many enemies were too weak to punch through heavy armor or to affect stronger demons. By casting a single but more powerful spell multiple times, Nathan could rely on simple spells while fighting more dangerous foes.

  And s
imple spells took a lot less time to cast. That was time that prevented him from having his head caved in many, many times.

  “Alright, let’s go into the nitty gritty,” Nathan said with a sigh. “Like I said, rank is typically used to measure complexity. In reality, it’s only about the level of efficiency.”

  Once again, a triangle appeared in front of Nathan’s hand. “You recognize this, right?”

  “Yeah, the shapes indicate the rank of the spell we’re casting,” Sen said.

  Vera was nodding along, but then shot a look of surprise at Sen. Her eyes bounced between Nathan and Sen, as if asking if she had heard right.

  “You’ve got the wrong way around,” Nathan said.

  In the next moment, the triangle turned into a square. Sen blinked.

  Then the square became a pentagram. Then a hexagon. Sen’s eyes grew wide enough to nearly eclipse her head. Nathan was casting a six-rank spell and had started it without even finishing his earlier spells.

  Then the hexagon became a heptagon, then an octagon, then a nonagon. Sen began to back away, looking around wildly.

  Then, finally, the nonagon became a decagon, with ten lines of blue light hanging in the air forming the shape. This was the most sides any spell frame normally had, as spells never went above tenth rank.

  “How…” Sen began to ask, her arms and legs shaking.

  Nathan tried not to laugh. “You realize that there’s no magic in this, don’t you? The shape is known as a spell frame. We then cast the spell into it, and it focuses the spell.”

  “Eh?” Sen blurted out.

  “My mentor did the same thing,” Vera said, shaking her head. “Although it was as part of a punishment. I thought he was about to erase me from existence. Although I was all of ten years old at the time. I can’t believe you can cast a sixth rank spell when you don’t even know about spell frames.”

  Sen’s mouth opened and closed several times as she stared at the decagon hanging over Nathan’s hand. “So… you can’t cast a tenth rank spell?”