Into Darkness

70

Richard glanced over to check and saw Vika talking to the Glee. Things seemed peaceful enough. They looked interested in whatever she was telling them. He turned his attention back to what he was doing, bending close to continue studying the series of symbols and emblems on the stone, trying to figure out what the parts he didn’t recognize meant.

He rubbed a temple with a finger as he worked to understand the connecting links. They were in fact different in a number of ways from the language of Creation he had learned, but he hadn’t told Vika everything he already knew about them. He wasn’t sure she could understand it—or would care to. Mord-Sith were famous for their dislike of anything to do with magic. Richard wasn’t yet positive that this gateway stone really did possess magic, but the symbols certainly did have a lot of the characteristic elements of magic as expressed through constructed spells. He almost had a hard time believing it could be something other than magic.

In large part, they did comply with the precepts of a constructed spell. And yet, in some ways, they didn’t.

He had created constructed spells before, and in his studies, he had learned a great deal about their complexities and how they functioned through principles of magic, both Additive and Subtractive. He knew a number of their key provisions. But that hardly meant he knew everything about them.

While this was in many ways the same element he knew, and understood, there were differences he couldn’t yet fathom. He traced components of things he knew, struggling to identify exactly how this was different so he could fill in the blanks.

In his studies of books of magic and in working with constructed spells he had access to, he had also learned a lot about his own gift. For reasons that eluded him, he had an easier time using his gift with constructed spells, perhaps because they were so technical, and the steps made sense. When he followed the steps in constructed spells in the proper way, the spell came to life. In other situations when he needed his gift, it didn’t always respond, so he naturally gravitated toward the type of magic with structure he could analyze.

He also suspected that those technical aspects that required him to concentrate distracted him enough to call upon his gift without really thinking about it when his magic was needed in procedures along the way. When he was relieved of the conscious pressure to call forth his gift, it simply naturally worked as required to assist him. Importantly, one of the things he had learned in his studies was that it took his gift not only to work with constructed spells, but to understand them.

It had always been difficult for him to call up his gift consciously, except in a certain kind of crisis, but here, with these emblems, he could sense them with his gift. It seemed like here, in this world, with this complicated spell he was able to touch his gift in order to understand elements in ways that were difficult or impossible to do back in his home world.

He realized that it felt to him like he was having much the same kind of ease with using his gift as he had experienced before, only in the underworld.

Because constructed spells were so rare, he hadn’t been able to study a lot of them. Having seen only a relative few, that left a lot of questions in his mind with the gateway.

He came to realize that, rather than trying to decipher every element of every symbol along the way to understand all of the language of Creation the way it was written on the stone, if he simply assumed it was a constructed spell and treated it as such, that very well might be the best way for him to come to grasp the entirety of what all the writing meant.

As he became more familiar with the symbols he hadn’t seen before, he began to learn by their context that it wasn’t really all that different from the language of Creation he already knew. This simply said things in a slightly different way. It might use the symbol for a bat to express flight, rather than the bird symbol he was familiar with. But it suddenly clicked in his mind that the larger concept was really the same. They were both referring to the concept of the air, or the sky. That realization helped him start to make faster progress in deciphering the overarching meaning of what he was reading.

When he glanced up, he noticed that the Glee across the sand were starting to look restless. Vika was walking back and forth, talking to them, distracting them. He certainly couldn’t afford to have the Glee suddenly decide that they didn’t want Richard messing around with their device, as they called the gateway.

But what was worse, he now realized that he was going to need to ignite a verification web if he was to learn more of how the gateway functioned, and he didn’t know how the Glee might react to that. He finally decided that there was no other way around it. He was simply going to have to do it.

Richard finally located the sequence of symbols that would initiate the verification web. He touched those symbols with a finger in the proper order, letting his gift flow into each of them to begin to unlock the constructed spell. It should work if the symbols were what he believed they were.

He held his breath and briefly tapped the last one to let a bit of Subtractive Magic feed the emblem.

Suddenly, all the symbols on the entire stone lit up as if they were made of glass and there was a light inside the stone. Every one of the symbols glowed a pale bluish color that stood out all the more because of everything else being some shade of red. More alarming, the thing started giving off a low humming sound.

Richard didn’t know if he had merely activated the stone in some way, or it was doing what he intended. He quickly went back to the symbols and tapped the next series in the proper sequence to add Subtractive Magic to them in order to find out if this really was a constructed spell. Subtractive Magic would break the necessary seals if it actually was a constructed spell. If it was, then something should happen to give him some kind of indication.

At first, nothing happened.

He held his breath as he waited.

All of a sudden, one of the emblems on the top of the stone, on the side opposite the sloped top, lit with red light. He touched it with a finger, letting it have a bit of Additive Magic. As soon as he did, it abruptly threw a series of lines through the air similar to the way a fisherman would toss out a net. But instead of sinking to the ground, this net of lines hung in midair over the sand. The lines all glowed the same pale bluish color as the other symbols on the gateway stone. That was a sign, but not yet the right sign.

He heard the Glee across the sand, crowded in among the rocks, start to hiss. It sounded to him like a hiss of impatience.

He glanced up at the intricate pattern of the lines hanging in midair only to see Vika rushing back to him.

The alarm on her face was clear.