Guild Mage: Apprentice-Chapter 138 - 137. Inscriptions

Liv drifted in and out of dreams, and in and out of pain.

When the pain grew too great, so that she writhed on the mattress and tore at her bandages, hands held her down and opened her mouth. The taste of whatever they put between her lips was bitter, and she tried to spit it out. Afterward, however, the pain would be washed away, replaced by stupendous waves of rolling pleasure that were nearly orgasmic.

When the euphoria came, it carried her back into dreams, until the pain returned.

The best of the dreams, the ones that came first, showed Liv the places that she loved. A clear blue mountain sky, warm summer sun, and a gentle breeze through the leaves of the aspen trees. Those dreams always came when she was furthest from consciousness. When Liv dreamed of people dying, she knew the pain would follow shortly after: her grandfather, his chest blackened with wyrm venom, struggling for breath on his deathbed; the brain of Karis, twitching when she impaled it with her blade; and finally Isabel, head snapped back by the paw of a monstrous, bestial corpse, pulled back into the dark shaft.

When she woke screaming from the dreams of death, it was to arms and legs that ached, bandages wrapping her body, and shortly after, the bitter medicine. Sometimes, Liv surfaced to the very edge of sleep, with just enough awareness to begin circulating mana through her body. It could have been the second surfacing, the third, or the twelfth when she finally realized there were new wounds each time she returned.

Some interminable stretch of time after she had consumed the magic of a goddess, Liv opened her eyes to only a dull ache, all over her body, and the slant of golden sunlight through a window onto her face. She could hear the sounds of someone bustling about the room, but rather than turn her head, Liv took stock of her own body.

First, her mana. She was brimming with it, overful, and Liv could only make her best guess as to how many rings there might be. Certainly more than twenty-four rings. Twenty-six, perhaps? She would have to get herself measured again when she'd made it back to Coral Bay. That feeling of stretching to contain the last shred of Costia's power had, it turned out, not been inaccurate.

But what Liv didn't remember were the cuts all over her body. She could feel them, bandaged and half-healed, along the backs of her arms and legs, her ribs, the spine of her back. She cast her mind back to Wren and Arjun carrying her out of the chamber where the goddess had died, searching her mind for the memory of another fight on the way out.

She'd destroyed all the risen corpses, hadn't she? And even if she'd missed one or two, that would have been well within her friends' capabilities. Had Jagan and his men attacked them on their route to the waystone? No matter how Liv wracked her mind, she couldn't remember that happening. There had been the feeling of her bones crawling beneath her skin, and then –

Liv lurched upright, grasping at her arms, feeling beneath the bandages for her elbows, groping for strange knobs or protrusions, for anything that moved when it should be still.

"You're not supposed to be up yet, m'lady," Thora said, setting down the clothes she'd been folding and rushing over to the bed. Now that she was up, and not focused on taking stock of her body, Liv could see that she was no longer in the barracks room with the rest of the journeymen.

The room was at least twice as big as where they'd all first been housed, for one thing, with high ceilings and not one, but three windows on the wall to her right, each framed in latticed wood that rose into gentle arches, with thin, gauzy curtains hanging between them. The fabric blew and danced in the fresh air with each gust of wind, breaking up the heat and stillness. Liv guessed that the door opposite the windows led to a hallway, and she noticed an interior door, on the same wall as the large bed, that most likely led to a washing chamber.

"Are we still in the fortress?" Liv asked, allowing Thora to ease her back onto a veritable cloud of pillows.

"We are," the maid told her. "General Mishra had you moved to the quarters they keep for important guests. Arjun's been waiting for you to wake up, I need to run and fetch him."

"I hurt all over," Liv said. "And my mouth tastes like death. What happened?"

"You were hurt, m'lady," Thora said, fetching her a cup from a carafe on the end table. "Here, you can drink some of this, it's mango juice."

This chapt𝙚r is updated by freeωebnovēl.c૦m.

Liv's arm ached when she wrapped her fingers around the cup, and she noticed that Thora kept her own hand over Liv's, as if the maid was afraid that she might drop it or spill her drink otherwise. Once she'd wet her throat, Liv let the other woman take the cup away.

"You can fetch Arjun now, if you like," she said, letting her arm drop back down onto the linen sheets. The sunlight was bright, so Liv closed her eyes just for a moment, to rest them. When she heard the door to the room swing open again, and several sets of shoes enter, she jolted back awake, and it was only then she realized that she'd dozed.

"How do you feel?" Arjun asked, approaching the bed and pressing two fingers to the inside of her wrist. Liv recognized the motion from her time learning first from Master Chirurgeon Cushing, and later in the college infirmary under Professor Annora: he was timing her pulse.

"Tired and sore," Liv said. "What happened? I don't remember getting all cut up."

"You weren't," Wren said, dragging a chair over to the side of the bed nearest the windows. Thora brought a second for Arjun, and he thanked her before taking a seat.

"What is the last thing you remember?" Arjun asked.

"Breaking the spell that Costia left," Liv said. "Using what was left of her mana to destroy every corpse that I could find." Including Isabel's. "Jagan had his men break down the walls to let them at us. That was why I sent you after them, you know," she said, turning to frown at Wren.

"Excuse me for running back when I heard you screaming," the huntress told her, with a hard edge in her voice.

"Do you remember why you passed out?" Arjun pressed.

"It was exhausting, handling that much power," Liv said. "I felt like too much sausage stuffed in too small a casing. And then - my bones. I thought I saw them starting to move. Like bugs crawling under my skin. But they seem to be fine now, so maybe I dreamed it."

"Whatever else you may have dreamed, that was real," Arjun assured her, releasing her wrist. "And Afeen does have a reputation for particularly vivid and bizarre dreams. But no, something about what you did down there sent Costia's magic rippling through your body, twisting your bones. I was hoping that the journey through the waystone would halt whatever was happening, but it didn't stop there."

"You must have solved it eventually, though," Liv guessed. "Because I feel fine now. Sore, but fine."

Arjun chewed on his lip for a moment. "I'm glad to hear that, because for several days, I was nearly certain that you would not survive."

This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

"You never told us that," Wren exclaimed. "You said it was dangerous."

"Would it have helped if I had?" Arjun asked, shrugging his shoulders. "Your bones were tearing your body apart from the inside out, Liv. Forming spikes and spurs that ripped through your own muscle. You were bleeding from a dozen internal injuries. When I tried to heal them, each one was just ripped open again, because the bones causing the problem remained. I had to try something, so I did."

"You used your word of power," Liv concluded. "To set my bones right."

"At first." Arjun nodded. "But though I could return the bones to their original shapes, and heal the wounds they caused, I could not find a way to stop further changes. Sooner or later, without constant care, you would have bled to death."

"I'm almost afraid to ask how you finally fixed it," Liv muttered.

"I did not," Arjun admitted. "Not truly. The magical effect that is warping your bones is still there - I layered on another effect to counteract it." Gently, he turned Liv's arm over, and traced his finger along the bandages, just over the healing cut that she could feel with her mana. "I enchanted your bones with sigils to make them more stable."

"You enchanted my bones," Liv repeated, struggling to process what he'd just said.

"It was pretty horrifying," Wren broke in. "He opened you up and carved your bones like one of those wands you all like to carry around, and then he healed you up again when he was done. Took ages to go piece by piece."

"You cut me open," Liv said, "and carved Vædic sigils into two-hundred and six bones?"

"Not all of them, no," Arjun explained. "It turned out not to be necessary, which is good because I'm not certain how I would have got all the sigils I needed on things like the three small bones in your ears. I designed the enchantment to reinforce the surrounding bones, as well, and concentrated on the largest ones."

"Arjun," Liv said, drawing out his name slowly, "what happens if one of my bones breaks?"

"Then the sigils are ruined, and the bones in that part of your body will start to warp again," Arjun admitted. "I'm sorry that I couldn't do better, Liv. Maybe with Professor Annora's help, and some time to experiment, we can come up with another solution."

Or I could learn how to control my Authority, Liv thought to herself. If Jurian could disable any spell that came within five feet of him, certainly she would be able to get rid of Costia's horrific magic once she'd reached the same level of control. In fact, for just the briefest of moments, she'd felt something like it down there at the bottom of the well, when she'd ripped the spell that had animated corpses for over a thousand years down into nothing but scraps of mana. But that had been while she was stuffed to the brim with the power of a goddess, and she doubted she could manage the feat again now.

"Alright," Liv said. "So, we go back to Coral Bay, and we consult with Professor Annora. They must be expecting us already - how long was I asleep for?"

"More drugged than asleep," Wren grumbled.

"A few days?" Liv asked. "Do they need us to help with the other two rifts?"

"Three weeks," Arjun said. "It took three weeks to finish all the inscriptions, and get the incisions mostly healed up."

Liv closed her eyes for a long moment. How much had happened in three weeks? The eruptions in Lendh ka Dakruim should all be over by now - the ones that had happened simultaneously, at least. The students and professors who had gone to the coronation would have returned to Coral Bay. She had no way of knowing whether Jurian's plan had worked - would she be going back to be arrested?

"Isabel – have they held a funeral?" she asked.

"Before they sent the other journeymen back," Arjun said.

She should have expected that – she had expected it, but Liv had hoped that she was wrong. There was no real reason to wait for a funeral without a body. "It's just us left behind, then?"

"The four of us," Wren confirmed. "And you should really think about where you want to go when we get down to the waystone. Without the other students here, there's nothing saying you have to go to Coral Bay. It would be just as easy to go to Whitehill."

"You have a few days to think," Arjun said. "You aren't ready to travel, for one thing. And for another, now that you're awake, General Mishra will want to speak with you."

"About Jagan," Liv guessed.

"Jagan. The spear. All of it," Arjun confirmed. "The commander is saying that you stole a sacred relic of our people."

"I suppose he didn't tell them how he broke down the walls to let the dead at us, when he was too afraid to do it himself," Liv remarked.

"He broke the wall down?" Wren asked, the feet of her chair scraping against the stone of the floor as she stood up. "How do you know?"

"I saw it," Liv said, turning her head so that the warm light from the window bathed her face. It was soothing. "I could see everything that was happening in the rift, for a moment there. Jagan's men with their hammers, the corpses coming down the hall." Isabel, or what was left of her. Liv didn't say that part out loud: there was no reason that any of her friends should have to share that particular memory.

"We should let her sleep," Arjun said, and Liv could hear from the movement of his own chair that he'd risen, as well.

"I only just woke up," Liv murmured.

"After what you've survived, you need time to recover," Arjun told her. "Consider this your chirurgeon speaking, not your friend. I will tell the general that you are awake. I know he will want to hear what you have to say."

"Make sure you tell Vivek Sharma, as well," Liv asked. "He knew Jagan was trouble. He warned me before we left."

"I'll find him," Wren promised.

The mere act of conversation shouldn't have exhausted Liv so: she'd hardly moved at all. And yet, she was as weak as if she'd run up one slope of Deer Peak and down the other. Rather than go to sleep, however, she slowed her breathing and took hold of her mana. After three weeks of rest, it was no wonder that she had plenty to work with.

As her father had taught her years before, Liv sent flows of magic out into her body, to find the healing incisions where Arjun had opened her to the bone. She smoothed the places that were raw and weeping, encouraging the skin to knit back together. Liv could tell Arjun had used his own magic, but there were so many wounds that he must have pushed himself to the brink just to keep her alive.

There was so much to do before she would be ready to fight again, and Liv had a feeling that she couldn't afford to be weak for long.

☙

Hours passed in a trance, while Liv worked on her body. Only when the door opened and closed, and Thora moved at the edges of her awareness, did she finally withdraw her intent from the flows of mana in her body, and open her eyes.

"I have food for you," Thora said. "It isn't bad – lentils, carrots, and apples, with all those different kinds of spices and peppers they like here, and some kind of cream." She set a steaming bowl on the end table next to the bed, helped Liv to sit up, and then dragged over a chair for herself.

"I always hated this," Liv said. "Every time I broke a bone, Master Cushing had to wrap me up in a plaster cast, and then I couldn't walk, or couldn't eat, or couldn't – something. I thought I was past it."

"If you want your strength back, you need to eat," Thora pointed out. It was the same thing Liv's mother would have said, or Gretta, so she sighed and set to it.

"What meal is this?" Liv asked. "What time of day?"

"Evening meal, m'lady," Thora said. "You woke up around midday."

When the doors opened again, this time to admit Arjun, Liv had wits enough to glance out into the hall. There, stationed by the door, she saw two ksatriya in their armor, and understood that she was a prisoner.

"General Mishra will speak to you tomorrow," Arjun said. "After the morning meal."

"Is Wren back yet?" Liv asked, but both Thora and Arjun shook their heads. "Alright," she said. "We're just going to trust that she finds the priest and gets him here on time. Arjun, how bad is this? What does Jagan want them to do to me?"

"Jagan wants you executed as a thief," Arjun told her, "and for, as he put it, defiling sacred ground. Mishra was able to put him off while I treated your wounds. I think the commander knows that if you died, he has very little chance of ever getting his hands on that spear."

"He's right about that," Liv said, scraping the last of the soup from the bottom of the bowl with her spoon. She must have been hungry, because she couldn't even remember eating it all. "If anyone at Kelthelis knew what he tried to do to us, they'd probably kill him as soon as he stepped out of the rift. Assuming they knew he was there." She grinned.

"How is any of this a good thing?" Thora asked, taking the bowl and spoon from her. "You're in no condition to fight, m'lady, and we're all alone here. If they want to throw us all in a dungeon, there isn't a thing we can do about it."

"That isn't true, though," Liv explained. "There's plenty we can do – we just have to do it like Julianne would. With politics, instead of magic. We have something they want - the spear. Or, at least, we know where it is. And that gives us leverage."