Chapter 10 To Kill a Wand
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To Kill a Wand
Levan rolled his late mother’s wand in his golden prosthetic palm.
The wand was a proud, handsome thing, carved of garnet wood and bolstered by an ascenite handle. Its core was shot through with a coveted weaverwick—a gift from dragonkind, allowing its holder to turn back time.
It had always galled Levan that while he was the last living Rezaran, the famed house of Timeweaving, he could not use the wand himself.
Even pushing himself to the brink of ruin, he had never been able to wind back a single second.
His mother had been weak with the art; perhaps it diluted with every passing generation. Perhaps it had skipped him altogether.
Lorissa Rezaran’s wand was a rare artifact, worth either a hundred thousand ascens or a death penalty, depending upon whom you asked.
And Levan knew, deep in his marrow, that he had to destroy it.
The turncloak was back in his ranks, for now.
He had ample evidence to land her a life sentence, if he caught even a whiff of her betrayal.
His compelling was a safety net, his ability to overpower her in any given situation.
He could keep her tamed, tempered—as long as he didn’t allow his late mother’s wand to fall into her hands.
A shame, really. Saffron Killoran could have been the most valuable weapon in his arsenal.
Were she trustworthy, she could make his dark missions so much smoother, could undo any accidental harm he caused to innocents, could enable greater risks in the name of finding a necromancer.
Hells, she could even help him revive the prisoner in cell six, turn back time to before they were so grievously injured.
But because he could not trust her, the wand had to die.
He could simply hide the weaverwick, of course, but he knew Killoran well enough to understand that she would stop at nothing to find it. Especially when so few true weaverwicks remained on the continent.
To kill a wand, however, was not a simple endeavor. A mage had to exact more destructive power on the wand than the wand itself possessed—and a wand of this caliber would require an immense amount of magic to best.
Wands were sacred. Sanctified. For the Vallish, to kill a wand was to spit upon all of magic.
More superstitious mages than Levan believed such an act would cause future magic to revolt against the destroyer, to resist command, to fight against every utterance and incantation.
But Levan was more practical than all of that.
He had to ensure nobody could ever wield that maligned power against him again.
The incinerator—a bulky copper furnace large enough to burn three corpses at once, with a broad chimney disappearing into the ceiling—was housed in a windowless room.
Brass sconces were bolted to soot-streaked walls, and three braziers stood before the incinerator itself, one burning yellow-gold, one burning pale blue, and one burning pure black.
A rack of torches hung on the far wall, ready to carry the different types of flame into the bleak oven.
For this, however, Levan needed emerald.
He plucked a vial of freshly made tincture from his potion belt.
He’d been rusty, at first, brewing the potions he needed in his old silver cauldron, but there had been a pleasing rhythm to the work, a sort of safe monotony he relaxed into.
A meticulous cross-checking of his reference books, a fastidious approach to chopping and grinding and blending ingredients. A clean, uncomplicated satisfaction.
He lifted the heavy door of the incinerator by the wooden handle, blistering heat rushing into his face. He poured the tincture into a shallow groove running around the furnace’s inside, and the orange flames turned vivid green in a smooth wave as the potion trickled along the channel.
Despite the sacrilegious intent, despite all the pain and grief, the perfectly executed spellwork sent a frisson of delight through him.
His intellect was one of the purest means of well replenishment he had in his arsenal; very few things gave him more gratification than hard study paying off.
That pleasure became power, curling into his well like a whorl of shimmering mist.
As he reached into his pocket to retrieve the weaverwick wand, however, a sharp bolt of agony shot up his forearm, a crossbow fired directly into the stump of his wrist. The golden prosthetic hand gave him flawless functionality, but the phantom pain from the injury itself was still obliterating—sometimes a dull ache, sometimes a searing burn, sometimes a bladed stab, sometimes a crushing sensation as though his hand was trapped beneath a metal bar.
The baseline was a sort of fuzzy static, like a rumbling thunderstorm, or the reverberating interior of a bell.
Good, he thought as pain flowed into his well. A well forever diminished by the injury, since he’d had to utter those eternal words—medei perpetua—for the prosthetic’s magic to become permanent.
A quirk of magic was that a mage’s well had a single bucket, so only one spell could be held at any given time.
Which was fine, if you were simply transmuting one object into another—coffee into hot cocoa, or a human body into a stone statue.
The magic occurred in the changing. After all, a mage murdered by a killing spell would stay dead once the caster moved on to another incantation.
But if you needed an object or a person to stay enchanted forever—enchanted, or protected, or alive in some unnatural way—then a part of the magical well had to be sacrificed.
Levan flexed the golden hand, still uncertain he’d made the right choice. He needed every scrap of power for the war to come.
Once the ruthless pain ebbed, he pulled the handle of the furnace’s loading compartment and withdrew the tray-like section, carefully laying the weaverwick wand on the very center.
He would not allow himself to consider the magnitude of what he was about to do. He would simply do it.
Stomach clenching, he raised his own wand.
“Sen abolan.”
Obliterate.
The effect on both the wand and Levan was immediate—and devastating.
The weaverwick shone a bright, apocalyptic white.
Levan crumpled to the ground, his own wand clattering across the flagstones.
Every scrap of magic in his well was sucked dry, and then some—a sense of dangerous overreach, of a negative energy balance.
The feeling that not just his magic had been siphoned, but something of himself too. His life-force, his essence.
The wand peeled terribly, lambent wood flaying from the core and vanishing in ghostly ribbons, the internal wick emitting a marrow-curdling shriek like a wounded dragon’s final roar.
Levan fought with every fiber of his being to reach up and shove the loading compartment shut.
As the dying wand met the green flames, a fierce explosion detonated through the chamber, through the room, through the city of Vallin entire. Something essential in Levan, and also in the world, perished forever.
For several moments, he lost consciousness.
When he woke, it was as though he’d been in a coma for a decade.
Weak, empty, sore.
A shadow, a negative image, a pale tracing of his usual self.
The braziers blurred above him, yellow-gold and pale blue and darkest black. Lying supine on the cold, hard flagstones, he cocked an elbow over his forehead and squeezed his eyes shut against the scarred inside of his arm. His breaths were shallow, unconvincing, and every inch of his body trembled.
Hells, he needed to replenish, and fast. If someone tried to take him down now, they might well succeed. He vowed to go for a long, brutal run. Ten miles, twenty, enough to hurt badly, so badly it was good, enough to begin the process of refilling his well.
For Levan, pain and pleasure had always been two sides of the same coin. He could not refill his well with a simple cup of hot cocoa, because on some level, he did not believe he was deserving of pleasure at all. No, he had to suffer for it.
Then again, perhaps there was a simpler way.
Loxlure.
A small stash of the black substance was tucked away in his desk drawer; an omnipresent test of will. A test he was dangerously close to failing.
Whenever he closed his eyes, he saw his father’s lifeless body, the shocked peel of his dead stare.
Heard the hoot of an owl overhead, the judder of time as Saffron inelegantly paused and unpaused it, her body lurching across the room in uneven fits and starts, uncanny, arachnid-like.
Felt a deminite shard through his palm, draining away his very lifeblood.
Loxlure would ease the memories in a way nothing else could, like fresh water cleansing blood from a wound until it ran clear.
All the tense muscles and rattling bones in his body would soften.
The shooting agony in his wrist would melt to nothing.
The questions in his mind, too big for the cage of his skull—how to lead, how to find another necromancer, how to exist alongside the silver traitor he had so loved—would shrink and shrink until he could roll them in his palm like dice.
Oblivion called his name, and it took every shred of willpower he possessed not to answer.