The Ninth Sorceress (The Price of Magic Book 1) by Bonnie Wynne

Author:Bonnie Wynne [Wynne, Bonnie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Talem Press
Published: 2020-02-02T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

The Five Towers of the Arts

Gwyn ducked and rolled as the low wall exploded, raining chunks of dust and brick.

Up! She was back on her feet and running before she could catch her breath. From the corner of her eye she saw Faolan’s second fireball coming at her. She held up her arms instinctively to shield herself, lashing out at the same time with scinder.

The fireball dissolved like mist, and hot sparks rained around her, winking out as they touched the ground.

She stopped running, her hands on her knees, gasping. Her left side twanged with pain in time with her breaths.

‘That was better.’ Faolan strolled over, a lazy smile on his face. ‘You perform well enough under stress. At this point I expect you could nullify any single sign I sent at you.’

Better. From Faolan, that was high praise. Usually it was a slap on the back of the head, a curled lip, a sneering comment about how a pregnant sow could move faster than she.

But Gwyn was improving, finally. It was getting easier to hone the vim into a sharp edge. Most of the time. If she concentrated too hard, it wouldn’t work at all. But when she stopped fighting and let it happen ...

The vim. It still frightened her. Their training ground – the burned-out shell of the old sheep shed – looked like a battlefield: all scorched grass and blown-out sections of wall. The smell of smoke made her want to heave her guts out.

Technically, she was a First Rank wizard now, though Faolan took pains to remind her that apprentices had no rank. She could hold the vim inside her for all of one second before it fizzled away, leaving her sweaty and dazed. Faolan said that without the apprentice bond as a buffer, holding the vim for any length of time would leave her mad and gibbering – if it didn’t merely burn her to a crisp on the spot.

She believed him. Even that one hard-earned second felt like trying to hold the sun inside her chest.

‘Quick,’ Faolan said, clapping his hands and pointing at her. ‘The Five Towers of the Arts. Tell me about the first. Go!’

She sighed inwardly, but pulled herself upright and began to recite, as she had at least once a day for the past two weeks. Faolan believed in rote learning, the duller and more wearisome the better; in drilling and meditating and reciting the same old dry catechisms over and over again. Learning magic, it seemed, wasn’t that different to learning herbs and remedies. Though she had rarely ended her lessons with Ascepis covered in soot and sweat.

‘The first school of the black arts is nullimancy, also known as the Tower of Agares. Nullimancy acts to sever and nullify magical forces. It can be used to stop an enemy’s attack, dissolve wards, or cut through another wizard’s threads.’

She could name the other schools, too. Metamancy, kinomancy, evocation. And the fifth: necromancy. That part had come as a rude surprise.

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