Watch this one, Scywin, she thought as she finished her mapping sub-spell and locked in her coordinates.
There was no explosion when she siphoned, not even a crack as the rock resisted the spell. The obsidian quietly fell into two pieces, mirror-smooth where her cut had passed through. It may not have been professional, but she couldn’t resist a smile as she placed the two halves on the scales before her and watched the needles bob to a stop at the same number. Perfect halves. Even on his second try, Mordra the Tenth hadn’t managed that.
A few of the archmages whispered to each other as they took in the results. Mordra the Ninth looked like he could kill someone—though it was unclear whether his ire was for Sciona, Bringham, or his shame of a son.
“Clearly, she just copied the first applicant,” Archmage Duris said.
“She didn’t, though,” Archmage Gamwen pointed out. “Her composition was different—and superior on multiple levels. Weighing the halves evenly, for one, instead of trying to gauge halves by a measure of length.”
“Still,” Duris said in irritation. “It’s not fair that she saw the spell performed before it was asked of her. I’m not counting it toward her score. Miss Freynan.” He turned sharp green eyes on her. “Let’s see if you’re up to more than simple cutting and ignition spells.”
At forty-two, Duris was the youngest archmage in a century, and Sciona supposed she couldn’t blame him for scorning her—or any mage—who performed in his presence. The master conduit designer had either invented or improved half the devices in modern Tiran. Who were these youngsters to encroach on his hard-won territory?
When he waved his gloved hand, the obsidian and scales vanished, replaced by a row of empty glass bowls.
“Using matter from the Otherrealm, create an incendiary device that activates when thrown over fifteen feet in the air.”
Matter from the Otherrealm? Not just energy?
“I’m sorry?” Gamwen looked incredulously at Duris. “How is this prompt relevant to the skills of a mapping specialist?”
It wasn’t. Alchemy was a highly specialized field that required entirely different training from all other spellwork. Siphoning matter from the Otherrealm was, after all, a fundamentally different practice from siphoning energy. Of the mages who had tested before Sciona, only one had been asked to siphon matter, and industrial alchemy had been his second major.
“I agree with Gamwen,” Duris’s senior conduit designer, Eringale, spoke up in an admonishing tone. “What are you trying to do, Duris? Blow the little lady’s hand off?”
It was Bringham who said, “Let her give it a try. It’ll be alright.”
“Will it?” Gamwen seemed doubtful.
“I believe so. In any case, it looks like she’s already started.”
Bringham knew his apprentice well. Sciona was already at the scratch paper, sketching a flowchart of the spells she would need.
There was no way to map for matter in the Otherrealm because no mage had ever found a way to display the physical reality of God’s Bounty. All a mage could do was choose his coordinates, siphon, and hope he got what he needed. And if he did get the matter he needed, it was often mixed in with a sludge of other elements, crushed together in the passage from one realm to the next. Sometimes, the blind-siphoned sludge was dangerous—explosive, acidic, or poisonous. More alchemists died in their laboratories than any other type of mage.
Before composing for the siphoning itself, Sciona wrote a separate spell to scan whatever came through from the Otherrealm and give her a chemical breakdown. Chemistry was not one of her specialties, but she hoped she would recognize a dangerous compound in time to leap back from the desk.
In the end, she had to siphon five times, filling all the bowls to the brim with mystery muck, before she came up with enough carbon for her purposes. Another painstakingly written alchemic spell pulled the carbon from all the dishes to form a ball the size of Sciona’s fist—her incendiary device. Not that pure carbon was combustible. Sciona couldn’t make a true material explosive because, well, she wasn’t a damn alchemist; she didn’t know the chemical composition of a bomb off the top of her head, and guesswork could kill her where she stood. What she could do was write around the need for advanced alchemy.
With the soon-to-be bomb resting on the floor before the desk, she was back in her element. Energy-based magic. Like all sourcing spells for conduits, this one had to siphon from Tiran’s energy Reserve. It was the only way for a sourcing sub-spell to yield energy automatically without the need for manual mapping and targeting. She assigned the sourcing spell the name’ POWER.’
Next, she wrote an action sub-spell called ‘FIRE,’ inside which she assigned the carbon ball the name ‘DEVICE’ and translated the directives scribbled on her notepaper into the runic language of the spellograph:
CONDITION 1: DEVICE is fifteen Vendric feet higher than its position at the time of activation.
ACTION 1: FIRE will siphon from POWER an amount of energy no lower than 4.35 and no higher than 4.55 on the Leonic scale.
ACTION 2: FIRE will siphon within the distance of DEVICE no higher than three Vendric fingers.
If and only if CONDITION 1 is met, ACTION 1 and ACTION 2 will go into effect.
The spellwork may not have come easily, but throwing the bomb was by far the most daunting part of the demonstration; true to form as a woman and a scholar, Sciona had a terrible arm. Stepping back from the desk, she carefully lowered the carbon ball and eyed her intended trajectory—over the desk but not directly over, away from herself, but not too close to the archmages.
Men sniggered on the benches behind her just as the Danworth boys once had when she tried to play ball with them in her skirts. Back in that schoolyard, she had turned around and hurled the deerskin ball ineffectually at the boys. If she did that here, it would be so much more satisfying—and possibly murder. As satisfying as the mental image was, she ignored her spectators and kept her eyes focused upward on the founding mages’ murals above. On where she was going, not where she had been.
With a deep breath, she drew her arm back and slung the ball toward the ceiling. DEVICE soared farther forward than she’d intended but successfully hit fifteen feet and—whoosh!—burst into flame.
Fire burned ferociously around DEVICE, using the carbon as an anchor in space, until the ball descended below fifteen feet, extinguished, and fell to the floor, trailing smoke. Another success.
The spells only got harder from there.
If the archmages meant this to demoralize her, Sciona supposed even their wisdom had its limits. The deeper she sank into complex magic, the more focused she became, the more her surroundings fell away until nothing mattered. Not even the opinions of the greatest men in the world.
At last, Gamwen leaned over to Orynhel and said, “Archmage Supreme, we’re nearing the maximum prompt count.”
And Sciona was almost disappointed. She was so wrapped in the work at this exhilarating pace that she didn’t want it to end. More importantly, she realized she had yet to fail a prompt. Cautious elation welled up inside her. There had been a few stumbles, yes, but no spell that she had failed outright. She was passing.
Nodding, Archmage Orynhel said, “Before we move on to our final deliberation, does anyone have a last prompt for Miss Freynan?”