Chapter 35: Planar Divination-Diverting Ward

Chapter 35: Planar Divination-Diverting Ward

Siobhan

Month 11, Day 28, Saturday 8:00 p.m.Updated from novelbIn.(c)om

Siobhan had returned downstairs and gone to sleep once again while Liza and Oliver were gone. She felt more normal when she awoke from a nightmare, though the headache and foggy thoughts still lingered. When the other two returned, she was surprised to see Oliver holding the belongings she had stashed in the alley.

“We swung around on the way back to grab them,” he explained.

She smiled in thanks. “I appreciate it. I was a little worried. I’m not sure how well they were hidden.” She looked at the box of components in Liza’s arms with interest. She was excited to watch Liza cast the warding spell, and perhaps to pick up a bit more of how the Lino-Wharton messenger spell worked.

Liza brought out a slender knife and a vial. “I’ll need some of your blood.”

“My blood?” Siobhan frowned.

She snorted at Siobhan’s hesitation. “There have been two attempts to find you past my wards already. But if you cannot trust me to take your blood, you definitely cannot trust me to make this warding artifact for you.” When Siobhan relented, Liza poked her in the arm and gathered a vial. Instead of beginning to set up the spell, Liza simply deposited the vial, along with her earlier purchases, in the room below where she’d previously cast the Lino-Wharton, then announced she was going to sleep.

Siobhan opened her mouth to protest, but remembered the bags under Liza’s eyes. The woman had been tired when they arrived, and had then spent most of the day in strenuous mental exercise. Even she would be risking Will-strain to cast such a powerful spell without being fully rested. Siobhan closed her mouth and simply nodded.

Before retiring, Liza warned Siobhan not to wander, and to go downstairs immediately if her medallion gave signs that any attempts to scry her were breaking through the wards on the upper level.

“I’m going to return home,” Oliver said. “I have business to attend to, and I would like to sleep in my own bed tonight. Will you be alright here?”

“Of course. You have your bracelet. I’ll set it off if anything horrible happens.”

As he turned to the door, he frowned. “I hope they returned my horse,” he muttered.

His words reminded Siobhan of a question she had meant to ask. “Do you know if everyone is alright? Was anyone arrested?”

His step faltered, and he hesitated a little too long in replying. “No one was arrested.”

Her eyes narrowed. “But something went wrong.”

He rubbed his face and muttered, “I am in poor form today,” before turning back to her. “They managed to get Jameson to the healer, but he didn’t survive the night.”

Siobhan reached for the nearest chair and sat down heavily. “What happened? Was it because of me?”

His words began low and a little hesitant, but grew more commanding as he spoke. “His heart gave out. I don’t know why.”

She bit her lip. “Blood loss?” Her voice was almost a whisper.

“Perhaps. I don’t know what Nidson did to combat the blood loss.”

“There are potions to boost blood regeneration, but they would have taken too long for Jameson, and over-strained his body,” she muttered. “Humphries’ adapting solution could have been spelled directly into his heart to replenish the fluid in his veins, but if the healer didn’t have any on hand...”

Oliver interrupted her musings. “This time you really must not blame yourself. Needing to heal that type of injury is something you couldn’t have anticipated. Not something you could reasonably have been expected to learn how to do ahead of time. Jameson would surely have died without you, so don’t pretend that you killed him when the truth is you simply couldn’t save him.”

She straightened her spine away from the back of the chair and nodded stiffly. ‘His words ring of truth, but that does not ease my feeling of responsibility. I was called on to save, and I did not.’

“What happens if I fall, or something hits me?”

“They won’t break, don’t worry.”

Siobhan took off her shirt and turned her back to Liza, who held a small athame in her hand. She balled up her shirt and shoved part of it into her mouth, biting down.

“Don’t move,” Liza warned, and began to cut.

Siobhan gasped and couldn’t help screaming a little through the cloth in her mouth. The cut was painful, but the feeling of something foreign sliding underneath her skin was worse, not only painful but also unnerving.

Liza began to speak, perhaps to distract Siobhan from the pain. “I call it a planar diversion ward. The artifact was created with your blood, and should settle into your body’s ecosystem without trouble, so we don’t need to worry about attempted rejection. Like your grandfather’s ward, this will activate automatically when any sort of divination is attempted toward you. It will work unaided against weaker spells, but will require your guidance and Will to augment it against more determined attempts. With the sheer efficiency of the design and its connection to the five Elemental Planes, you should be able to stymie attempts by those magnitudes more powerful than you, as long as your Will is clear, sound, and forceful.”

Liza repeated the process of inserting the disks four more times, one for each corner of the pentagram, the top disk sliding under the skin at the base of Siobhan’s neck. When she was finished, she wiped up the blood with a rag and used a couple of salves that left the slices in her back nothing more than thin scars next to slightly firmer places on her skin.

Then, she drew a final spell array on Siobhan’s back and made her lay down while she cast an augmented healing spell, reattaching the flow of blood through the disks. “Your blood will act as Sacrifice, so no need to prepare anything else. If all goes well, even with heavy use the spells within should last for a few decades,” she said with pride. “It is a masterwork.”

Siobhan shuddered and moved around to test the feel of the new additions to her back. They still hurt, and she imagined they would for a while, until her body grew used to them.

“Let us test it,” Liza said, taking a crystal ball off a shelf and heading back downstairs.

Siobhan helped her to clean up the spell array on the floor of the casting room, and then Liza spent a couple of minutes drawing the array for a rudimentary scrying spell. She dropped the dirty, bloody rag in the component Circle that called for a tracking link, the beast core from the earlier spell in the powering section, and the crystal ball in the center. “You will feel the pressure when I attempt to scry you. The artifact is connected to your body, so all you need to trigger it is your Will and a Conduit.”

The only other artifact Siobhan had ever heard of that could be controlled with Will alone was the transmutation amulet that hung around her neck, though it didn’t even have any components that she could tell. ‘Does that mean its creator was at least a Grandmaster of artificery? Perhaps they were even an Archmage.’ The thought sparked a feeling she couldn’t quite label.

“Remember, this ward is not meant to directly oppose a scrying spell. It turns aside, deflects, and hides you instead, which is what will allow a sorcerer as weak as you to successfully overcome the much stronger casters the coppers can supply. You should be careful of using it when people in your immediate vicinity are already focused on you, as some of the effects may spill over into your physical surroundings. People will be less likely to notice you and find it harder to focus on you while it is active, and this could lead to suspicion among the observant.” With that, she took out her Conduit and began to cast.

Siobhan felt the pressure of Liza’s attention immediately, as if a giant eyeball with thousands of tentacles hung in the air above her, the tentacles closing in. She held the small, cloudy Conduit that she hadn’t used since she was a child and pushed her Will into the artifact on her back. She was careful not to push too hard, both because she wasn’t fully healed from the Will-strain, and because this Conduit couldn’t channel more than a hundred thaums. She sincerely did not want to experience the backlash of a failed Conduit, again.

She felt the effects of the ward take hold. The mental sensation of pushing aside notice was difficult to describe, except that she felt like one of the Fey, who were supposedly so agile they could dance between the raindrops without ever being hit. The five spots on her back stung as if being poked by a few dozen needles, repeatedly.

Liza dropped the spell, tossing the bloody rag into the brazier in the corner and setting it alight. “It works. I was using at least eight hundred thaums there, and I still couldn’t bring your image or location into clarity, and it had nothing to do with the wards around my house.”

Siobhan grinned, reaching a hand back to rub at the disks under her skin, which felt a little cool for a few seconds after Liza stopped casting. She ran up the stairs again to examine her back in the large silver mirror against one of the walls. The flesh around the disks had already regained most of its color by the time she reached it. “Let’s try another type of divination!” she called back down the stairs as Liza followed at a slower pace.

Liza raised her eyebrows. “Sure. If you’d like to pay me for additional work.”

Siobhan clamped her mouth shut immediately and put her shirt back on, but she couldn’t help the giddy feeling inside or the upward twitch of her lips. This was magic, real magic, and it belonged to her. “Can I activate it without a divination attempt to deflect?” She tried it before Liza could answer, deflating a little when it didn’t work.

“No,” The woman confirmed, then muttered something that sounded like, “greedy and unappreciative of my genius.”

‘I won’t be able to use it to sneak around without being noticed, then. Well, not unless I could somehow purposefully trigger a scrying attempt...’ She would have to test what types of minor divination were recognized by the ward, and then see if there was some way to cast them into a potion or simple artifact of her own. Still, her biggest priority had been achieved.

The coppers would not have her.

“This is wonderful, Liza. Thank you.” She pushed her sincerity into her voice. “I can’t wait till I’m as knowledgeable and powerful as you.”

Liza snorted. “I wouldn’t hold my breath until then, child,” she said, but she covered her small smile with her teacup.