Andrew Rowe - Sufficiently Advanced Magic

I could appreciate that sort of thing, but I wasn’t in the mood for theatrics. I was nervous enough already.

“I have a message for you, but my understanding is that it’s something that shouldn’t be overheard. Is this a good place and time, or…?”

She waved a hand and stood up with deliberate effort. “Just wait for a moment.”

Professor Orden traced a pattern on the wall behind her with a single finger, leaving a gleaming trail where her finger made contact.

She’s drawing runes. I didn’t recognize the specific shapes, but she drew several of them.

She turned around, folding her arms. “This had better be worth my effort.”

“It’s secure now?”

She nodded in confirmation. “I took the basic precautions. Out with it.”

I glanced at the runes, then back to her. “The Voice of the Tower would like to speak to you.”

She let out a string of creative expletives, the kind and variety that you’re definitely not supposed to say in front of children.

“I’m pretty sure that’s anatomically impossible,” I replied.

“Quiet. I need to think.” She shut her eyes, folding her arms again.

Is this really that big of a problem? I haven’t even told her the details yet.

It was several moments before Professor Orden reopened her eyes, taking a deep breath. “I spoke too soon. This office is secure, but not secure enough for this conversation. I will contact you again at a later time. If you have not already been informed, you are most likely in significant danger. Take precautions. Do not speak to anyone else of this.”

I held up my hands in a warding gesture. “Significant danger? Can you, uh, elaborate about that please?”

Orden tightened her lips. “Just the fact that you know about the existence of the Voice means you probably attracted the attention of one or more of the visages. The kind of attention that usually results in people disappearing. So, as I said, take precautions.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Precautions? Against a visage?”

“Goddess above, boy, were you never briefed on this? Never mind. A visage isn’t going to be dropping out of the sky to annihilate you directly. Their agents are the ones you need to worry about. I can’t give you details here. Wherever you’re sleeping, ward it. Be thorough. Set up means for contacting help rapidly. Keep a weapon near you at all times. If you’re attacked directly, retreat to a populated area and make as much noise as possible.”

“By ward it, you mean—”

The professor held up a hand to stop me. “Don’t tell anyone about the details of your precautions, including me.” Her lips pursed, and she turned to the book case on her right, retrieving a key from the clutter. She tapped three times on a drawer in her desk, whispered something, and then turned the key in the lock. Once the drawer was open, she whispered again and reached inside.

There was an intricately carved chest inside the drawer, as well as a small pouch. The box immediately caught my eye. The runes on it resembled the ones on the entrance doors to the Serpent Spire, but I’d never seen similar styles on human-made equipment.

She removed the pouch and closed the drawer. “You’d better have good enough information to make this worth my trouble, Cadence.”

I lifted the bag. It didn’t have much heft to it, but there were at least a few coins inside. “Thank you.”

“You can thank me by leaving quickly, pretending this conversation never happened, and not dying until we have an opportunity to discuss things further.”

Goddess, what did I get myself into? “What if someone asks why I was here?”

“You had a message to deliver from my sister, Caela. It was a physical letter. You didn’t read it. I thanked you, paid you a courier fee, and sent you on your way.”

“Where would I have met this sister?”

“No one is going to ask you that.” She sighed. “But you’re right to ask. Say she was at the school’s recruitment tent outside the tower. No one will think to check. Now go.”

Her tone didn’t brook any argument. She sat back down, moving to her default position, waiting for the next student. I left the room, walking hurriedly back to my dorm.

The first thing I did when I got back to my room was try to write down the runes that I’d seen on the box in her drawer. I’d only had a few moments to look at them, but I thought I had a pretty good recollection of what some of them looked like.

My basic rune book was no help, but Advanced Artifice had some clues.

The central rune was something called a “containment” rune, and it was used for storing things inside a container that were larger than the container itself. I’d heard of things like that before — bags that were used to store large numbers of items, for example. There were diagrams for the runes for making exactly that type of bag, but while the central rune matched that design, nothing else did.

I came close to identifying one of the other runes, the one just to the left of center. It looked similar to a rune designed for governing range for teleportation spells, but the bottom section was drawn differently.

The one on the far right? I was pretty sure I’d either remembered it wrong or it was just a bunch of squiggles someone had made while they were bored.

I still didn’t know enough to understand what the whole thing was supposed to do, but I could tell this kind of thing was powerful . The kinds of runes I saw in the introductory runes book had “mana values” in the single digits. The most similar teleportation range rune I could find was classified at Citrine-level and required air mana and transference mana in the hundreds.

There were a number of other runes on the box that I couldn’t remember as well, and ones I couldn’t make out at all from my angle.

I really wanted one. Maybe I could convince her to let me take a look at it in more detail later?

I also wanted to know why she’d whispered before opening the drawer. Was she unlocking the drawer, or maybe disabling a trap?

I sighed. It didn’t matter. The box, as interesting as it was, wasn’t what I had to work with.

She’d told me to take precautions, so that was the next thing on my agenda. What could I do with the resources I had on hand? I had my handful of crystals, a few silver sigils and some bronze ones, and whatever she’d put in that pouch.

I checked the bag, fully expecting it to contain more wealth than I’d seen in my entire life. It didn’t. Just a half dozen extra silver sigils… and, more interestingly, a single finger-sized transparent crystal.

I’d have to figure out how to identify crystals at a glance at some point.

In the meantime, I packed the crystal away with my others and flipped open the basic runes book. I managed to locate a couple of the runes I’d seen the professor drawing on the wall, and I wondered how she’d been doing it without crystals in hand. Was she powering the runes herself? If so, how many attunements did she have?

The one on the left was “silence”, a simple rune for blocking noise. The other one was “blindness”, which blocked vision. Drawing them on walls wouldn’t do anything on its own, though.