Chapter 20:

Chapter Sixteen

A Whisper in Scarlet


When Ven made it back to the safe house on the east end of the city, she was surprised to find that Master Eujin still hadn’t arrived back. She set about gingerly storing all of the gear she’d been carrying back where it all belonged, trying her best not to do anything that would make her ribs hurt worse than they already did. Once everything was stored, she stripped out of her blacks and tossed them in the laundry before running a bath from the tap. The capitol had many things that much of the rest of the Duchy of Ravelle lacked, but the one that Ven appreciated the most was running water, especially hot running water. Master Eujin said there were boilers placed underground throughout the city to provide hot water to everyone. Ven had no idea what a boiler was, but she assumed it was some kind of machine that made things hot, kinda like a stove.

On her way back to the tub, she grabbed several vials and pouches of powder that she proceeded to dump into the water. It hissed and bubbled, filling the air with a cloud of medicinal and floral smells as they all mixed and dissolved. While magic healing was fastest and most effective for fixing large wounds, Ven had come to discover that even the simplest treatment she attempted was enough to give her blightbrands all the way to her shoulders. Once she realized how much it cost her, she never tried it again. It had taken weeks for them to recede away, and they burned like fresh blisters at the slightest touch. So she let alchemical healing be enough.

A bath filled with thistlewick, harrowhast, gloven root powder, and bekkle sap wouldn’t completely heal serious injuries, but soaking in a mixture of them for an hour was beneficial enough that it took a month or so off of recovery time for any damage done. This was enough to heal most small things, and make larger ones more manageable. The only downside is that the components weren’t cheap unless you harvested them yourself. And only the very capable or very stupid tried to harvest the roots of a wild gloven. They made a habit of ensnaring any living thing that came too close and dissolving them in large bladders filled with acid. And the process for collecting bekkle sap… well, that just wasn’t even worth thinking about.

Once the water had stilled again, Ven shed her smallclothes and lowered herself carefully into the steaming water with a long sigh of satisfaction until the waterline reached her chin.

These past six months had gone by much, much faster than she’d ever expected. They’d arrived in Transel a day after her encounter with the Krins, and Master Eujin had wasted no time trying to find any word of Sevastian. Despite their efforts, however, no leads surfaced, and Ven got the distinct impression that the harder Master Eujin seemed to look, the less anyone seemed to want to talk. She could always tell when he’d hit a fresh dead end. He always worked her particularly hard on those days.

Training was from dawn to dark every single day, with more than one night’s sleep interrupted by Master Eujin jerking her out of bed for a midnight trek of the city. Every day she did more exercise than she’d ever imagined possible for one person to do, as well as empty-handed combat, weapons training, stealth, and acrobatics. By now, she could run flat out for half a mile before her legs started shaking, could scale a flush wall barehanded in a few moments, and could swing a blade fast enough and accurately enough to cleave a piece of hair in two before it touched the ground. Despite all of this, however, she’d still never been able to come close to laying a finger or blade on Master Eujin. She was fast, but he was something else entirely.

Once she was too exhausted to move, then they’d move on to academics, where Master Eujin went into great detail about botany, chemistry, alchemy and a host of other intellectual pursuits, all in the service of their practical application in the execution of deception, medicine, and violence. She always found it difficult to keep her eyes open during these lessons, unless they involved something that exploded, but she was making solid progress overall. The many bruises on the backs of her hands from Master Eujin disciplining her for messing up notwithstanding, of course.

The last thing they would train every day were the two types of magic, and it was here, more than any of the other things she was being taught that she really felt her attention captured.

The first several weeks had been spent trying to find the limits of her Sa’Cari abilities, which Master Eujin said would be necessary for her to improve them. To Ven’s disappointment, however, while she was a Sa’Cari, the type of Names she could see was solely limited to bladed weapons. If it was a dagger, or a sword, or even an axe, she could command it if she could see its name. Anything else, however, including other weapons, was inaccessible to her. Master Eujin said as he understood it, Sa’Cari gained the ability to see the names of what they see as most important when they Awakened. In her case, the most important thing when she Awoke was the knife being shoved into her chest, so she was given the Names of knives and other blades.

She also, he explained, instinctively knew the True Name of her body and self, and could unconsciously give it commands that other people simply could not. He then went on to explain that this control is what made her able to do all the things she had been doing physically. A normal person would take years, even decades, to achieve the level of skill and fitness she had already had, and would have been completely unable to move by the end of her first day of training on the road. But she could do it day after day without a break. And this was solely because she willed herself to keep doing it.

Sa’Cari, and even some who would otherwise not be able to Awaken, could also gain access to the Names of other things around them through a couple of means.

The most common was through what was known as sympathetic association. If you developed a strong enough bond with something, its Name would become visible to you. Bonds developed through either strong emotional attachment or constant use, so those who could see Names would do everything they could to give everything around them as much significance and use as possible in order to increase their spheres of command.

The next most common was by killing another Sa’Cari, and capturing the Names before they escaped the dead’s vitae. If the killer succeeded, they would gain every Name the previous bearer had ever carried.

The least common was being given a Name or Names by another Sa’Cari. The giver would have to be willing, and would lose the ability to ever use that Name again. It also apparently involved some sort of ritual or something, though Master Eujin said he didn’t know the specifics. When she asked why someone couldn’t just tell the Names to another person, Master Eujin asked her to tell him one. She opened her mouth to speak, but instead of the Name she was reading, all that came out was a harsh, abrasive sound like two rough stones being rubbed together. She tried to write it out instead, but every attempt resulted in her hand shaking so convulsively that all she could manage was an illegible collection of ink splatters. It was as if the very fabric of reality itself was preventing her from sharing them. This was, Master Eujin explained, why no one had ever amassed a library that contained every Name ever found. There was no way to record them, outside of storing them inside another Sa’Cari. This didn’t stop her from continuing to try, though she had to be a lot more secretive about it once Master Eujin forcibly took away her quill and inkpot and forbade her from trying any further. It took nearly a week of scrubbing to get those inkstains off the stone floor.

Thaumaturgy, it turned out, was a lot more simple. Not easier, but simpler. Once you knew a Word of Power, you simply focused your intention on what you wanted to happen and spoke it, and it happened. Want to tie that sword into a knot? You can do that. Want to hurl a massive ball of lightning? You can do that too. And she did it, one after the other, feeling like her heart was about to explode from the euphoria in her veins. It all came so effortlessly that Ven wondered aloud if that was all there was to it. Master Eujin said nothing, but simply walked over and pulled the front of her tunic open. She went to protest, but froze in place when she saw the thick black blightbrands had already made it all the way up her arms, across her shoulders, and were beginning to creep onto her ribs and collarbones.

“Breaking the rules of reality is easy. Having the self-control not to… that’s the hard part.” He said, ending their practice. They hadn’t practiced Thaumaturgy again after that for almost a month. And what a hellish month that had been. The brands hurt like fresh burns, and flared up in pain at the slightest disturbance. Bathing in hot water with them felt like sticking her arms into a bread oven, and she found herself suffering through many a cold bath before the pain was finally manageable enough to increase the temperature again.

The pain was not the real problem, though. After using all of that magic, and experiencing the full-body ecstasy it caused, she found herself craving it. It was like an itch somewhere in the depths of her soul that she couldn’t scratch any other way but by casting. So she did, and experienced instantaneous relief. Until the spell stopped, and the itch came on even worse than before. It got to the point that she had to sit on her hands when she had a free moment, and made sure to never find herself alone for fear of caving in to the cravings. Only when the brands finally completely faded did the cravings go away. From that point forward, she treated Thaumaturgy with the same kind of fearful respect one might give a venomous snake. So long as she kept her casting focused and minimal, the pain and the addiction would never grow too great for her to handle. 

But the fear of getting swept away always lingered in the back of her mind, and she couldn't help but wonder if one day might come where she couldn't stop herself in the throes of passion and lost her mind as the brands warped her into a monster.

It kept her up at night, and she sometimes wondered if it would be better to have never known how to use it at all.