An Inheritance Of Magic by Benedict Jacka

Author:Benedict Jacka
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780356519913
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

I spent most of the day playing with my new toy, then got a full night’s rest and went out again early next morning. Most of the Wells I’d found last week had been empty, nearly empty, or inaccessible, but there’d been one other useable one: a fragile, ephemeral-feeling Light Well in Canning Town.

The shaping went much more smoothly this time. This was partly because I was making a design I already understood, but I was also coming to realise that Light Wells were just easier. The essentia seemed to respond naturally to my thoughts, arranging itself as I wanted.

The sigl I made this time was a flash effect, designed to blind attackers with a burst of light. I’d learned some lessons from practising with the Motion sigl, and I didn’t try to make it a continuous flow: instead I shaped the sigl so that it functioned as a tiny capacitor, storing up energy over a half-second before releasing it all in an instant. The result consumed a lot more essentia than my old light sigl, but was much more powerful. It was the first time I’d tried to shape a sigl with that kind of capacitor element, but I was able to get the design to work quite easily.

I was starting to fully appreciate just how big an advantage my new essentia sight was. Being able to see my own constructs let me spot mistakes as I made them, instead of only finding out once a sigl was misshaped and worthless. Without that, making that slam sigl would probably have taken me a good three or four attempts, which would have meant either finding more Motion Wells, or waiting for years to get that much essentia out of the one at Channelsea. As it was, I’d done it in a single try.

Maybe this was how corporations and Houses were able to make sigls so easily? But Maria had insisted that essentia sight had nothing to do with it. It was confusing.

In any case, once I started practising with my new sigls, I quickly realised that my drucraft skills had some major gaps. I was good at sensing and shaping, but the way I’d got good at them had been by being slow, controlled, and patient. My new flash and slam sigls were designed for fights, which meant that they needed to be used in a hurry. And once I started trying to do things in a hurry, it became very obvious that being slow and patient did not work at all. To use a slam sigl to hit a moving target – like, say, a Coke can tossed into the air – you had to channel a burst of essentia into the sigl, very fast, while maintaining concentration on your aim. After missing the can twenty-five times in a row, I decided to try a mock battle, and that evening I went back to that secluded spot in Channelsea to stage a pretend drucraft fight. I imagined that I

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.