Key to Magic 04 Emperor by H. Jonas Rhynedahll

Author:H. Jonas Rhynedahll
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Rhynedahll Software
Published: 2012-06-30T05:00:00+00:00

The morning after the battle, while the flotilla readied to depart Elboern, Mar flew over the ruins of the fort and its environs, searching until he found one of the cubes that had smashed through and broken Number Three. If those cubes had been just simple metal, he should have been able to infuse them with flux, if only weakly and temporarily, or at the very least manipulate their natural modulations in some way. With not just his own, but thousands of lives depending upon his magic, he needed to find out why it had failed him in this case.

The cube had driven itself almost a manheight in to the ground near the ruins of the watch tower, and been buried by subsequent settling of the ground. After clearing away an overburden of stone rubble with magic, he found he could do little to remove the loose soil and had had to get the assistance of two quads of Dhrasnoaeghs' legionnaires to help him excavate a pit. He had tried to infuse the loose clay and loam to make it heave itself out of the way, but had achieved only poor results. It seemed that the relatively small proportion of sand in the mixture made it unresponsive to the sound-colors with which he was most proficient.

After half an hour of energetic digging, the legionnaires had cleared a large hole all around the sides of the cube and down to its tilted base, leaving it fully exposed. At this point, the fugleman in charge of the detail told him that it would be necessary to erect a gantry crane to winch the chunk of metal out, but Mar deferred, explaining that he had no need to immediately extract the cube, and climbed down the foot holds that the legionnaires had cut into the sides of the pit.

It was immediately apparent that this was not one of the Brotherhood's artfully crafted ancient relics, but rather a modern and decidedly crude casting in a poor grade of soft steel. At approximately one armlength in dimension, he guessed its weight at something approaching a thousandweight. None of its corners were true and its slightly irregular surface had the crusty pitting of a slag encrusted mold. It also possessed wormhole like voids where air had been left negligently trapped in the molten metal and a light patina of spreading orange rust. Whoever had cast it had not bothered to take the typical preventative measure of oiling its surface. The metal smiths of Khalar would have called the righteous condemnation of the Forty-Nine down on any apprentice slovenly enough to have presented such reprehensible workmanship.

As he tried to delve it, he discovered its one significant feature and the reason that he had been unable to affect its fall -- the metal was entirely devoid of ethereal flux. Up until this point, he had encountered nothing that did not have a corresponding ethereal projection and had believed that a physical object and its projection were inseparably combined, that one could not exist without the other.

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