The Rogue

“No.”

He was silent for the rest of the way to the carriage, probably contemplating having a daughter grown up enough to become a novice. She remembered how she had felt when Lorkin had made his vow and received his first set of robes. The pride she’d felt had been tinged by the memory of how she had broken that vow, and of the day the entire Guild had filed past, tearing her and Akkarin’s robes in a symbolic gesture of rejection, before sending them both into exile.

As then, she pushed that memory aside. Lorkin might have gone to live in a hidden city of rebels, but there had been no serious discussion about exiling him because of that decision. Which was reassuring. If the Guild still believed he would find his way home, then it was much easier to believe the same thing herself.

CHAPTER 22 IN GOOD COMPANY

Something brushed against Lorkin’s senses. He ignored it, but the sensation came again and something about it made his skin prickle. The interruption was annoying but, as he had been taught, he accepted it and carefully disengaged his mind from the growing gemstone.

As awareness of his surroundings returned, he opened his eyes and looked around the cave for the source of the distraction. It wasn’t the stone-makers sitting nearby. They were glancing around in the same way as he was. He was fairly certain that it wasn’t the two magicians standing by the door, though their postures hinted that they had been talking. He’d learned to block out nearby conversations days ago.

He listened, and realised he could hear a faint, low noise. At the same time he noticed that he could feel, under his hands, feet, and through the chair, a vibration.

At once his heart began to race, and he quickly drew magic and surrounded himself with a strong barrier.

A tremor, he thought. I wonder how bad it is.

Not bad enough to send the other magicians fleeing the city, he noted. Were the non-magicians evacuating right now? The last time he’d seen the valley outside, it had been covered in a deep blanket of snow. The thought of what might happen should the entire city collapse and strand thousands of people out in the savage cold made him shudder.

The city had survived, albeit with a few cave-ins, for many hundreds of years. That didn’t mean there would never be a day when a tremor was severe enough to destroy it, but it did reassure him that the odds of not having to somehow dig his way out from these deep tunnels under the mountain were in his favour.

Still, it does highlight why some people here believe the Traitors must eventually leave Sanctuary.

He looked around the room. Walls glistened with crystalline points of reflected light. No longer were these outcrops a colourful mystery to him. He knew what each patch was destined to be – which magical task it was being trained to do.

Two kinds were made: patterned and powered. The patterned stones had merely been imprinted with a way to shape magic. The user sent magic into the stone, and it shaped that power into something physical: force, heat, light and various familiar combinations. The intensity of the output was controlled by how much magic was put into the stone. This was what magicians did when they channelled magic out of themselves, so the patterned stones were of not much use to a magician unless he or she hadn’t learned how to do a particular task yet, or could not do it well. They were also of no use to a non-magician, since they couldn’t channel power out of themselves, and had very little or no power to channel anyway.

It didn’t take me long to work out how useful it would be to train gemstones to Heal, so I imagine it’s already occurred to a few Traitors. But there seems to be a limit to the complexity of the task a stone can be trained to do, so if any Healing stones were made they’d only be able to perform basic tasks.

The second type of stone – the powered ones – were far more useful to a magician. They were taught to do the same sorts of tasks, but in addition the maker infused them with their own store of magic. However, this magic was depleted with use. If well made, stones could be re-infused. Less successful stones were single-use. Sometimes they were made to be single-use deliberately, if what they were used for destroyed them, but the majority of powered stones were meant to be re-infused.

Which is so similar to the way the Guild keeps the Arena, and any magically strengthened buildings, strong. The buildings lose magic very slowly, but the Arena and the barrier around it is occasionally battered during Warrior lessons and practice, and has to be strengthened constantly.

The two kinds of magic – the strengthening of buildings and stone-making – were so similar that Lorkin was amazed the Guild had never stumbled on the latter before, until it occurred to him that there were no caves full of naturally occurring gemstones in Kyralia. Neither could they work with imported stones, since by the time these reached the hands of magicians, as jewellery, they were too old to be imprinted effectively.

The other impediment was that the architect who had invented the method of strengthening stone with magic had lived during an era when black magic was banned. Lorkin felt a chill as he remembered how easily and quickly he’d grasped the ideas behind black magic. In less than an hour he’d broken his vows as a magician and a centuries-old taboo.

And for all that, it’s been a bit of a disappointment. I haven’t got any stronger. It hasn’t given me any new skills. All it’s done is enable me to more easily understand and apply the process of stone-making – which will be of limited knowledge to the Guild unless they manage to find some gemstone caves in Kyralia, or work out how to create them another way.

Learning black magic had given him a more realistic view of the magic within him, and his own strengths and vulnerabilities. He suspected it was possible to raise a stone to perform a task without knowing black magic, but it would have been like working blind – impossible to tell if he was getting it right, how much magic the stone could hold, or when it was ready to use.

He looked down at the small green gemstone in his hands. For most of the process, he’d had to work with it while it was still attached to the wall, and a few times he’d lost it among the masses of stones there. When he’d established enough of an imprint upon it, he’d been able to remove it and refine its training at a table.

Long periods of unwavering focus were required. He understood, now, why Tyvara had said she didn’t have the patience for stone-making. Speaker Halana had also told him that making stones that produced heat or explosive force could be dangerous, if the maker’s concentration broke, too much magic was stored in it or the stone was flawed. That was why some stone-making was done in remote caves, where entry was forbidden except by the invitation of the stone-maker who worked there.

Lorkin was making a light-producing stone. Though it was more difficult, he was also being taught how to infuse it with magic. It was also more dangerous because a learning stone-maker could easily infuse it with too much power, or lose concentration. He could have been given a duplication stone to use. These could create endless copies of the pattern held inside them – particularly stones to be trained in complicated magic. Speaker Halana, however, insisted that all students first learn how to create a stone without the help of duplication stones, so that they did not come to rely on them too much.

The vibration had stopped now. Lorkin glanced around the room. The other stone-makers had returned to their work, heads bent over tables. He drew in a deep breath and started a mind-calming exercise. He did not know if the Traitors had similar exercises, but the simple ones he’d been taught at the University were coming in very handy now.

As he was about to send his mind out to the stone again, he heard his name murmured. He looked up. Speaker Halana was walking toward him.

“How is it going, Lorkin?” she asked as she reached his table.

“Good, Speaker Halana,” he replied. “Well, nothing has gone wrong yet.”

She smiled crookedly, with a now-familiar dark humour, and picked up the stone. All but the newest stone-