Sorcerybound (World's First Wizard Book 2) by Aaron Schneider (best color ereader .TXT) 📗

“The characteristics of the fey may be mutable, but what he or she wants to be, what they will, isn’t going to change, right?”

“Almost,” the marquis said, his alien eyes twinkling with a flash of puckish mirth. “Will is fundamental, but even fundamentals can be bent or broken. And that is where the Art comes into play.”

The fey passed a hand over his face, and the long, pensive features were replaced by a baphometian horror. A shaggy, goatish snout filled with slavering fangs snapped with bone-crunching force, while the huge head with a crown of barbed horns tossed left and right, sending ribbons of burning brimstone through the air. Each man felt the heat of the hellish breath against his face, and each nearly retched at the pungent aroma of sulfur and sweaty beast.

Milo and Ambrose fell back startled, their backs to the open gallery window. Hands fell to weapons, while their muscles bunched in equal preparation to leap into the fray or to an uncertain escape to the hall below. Milo’s coat could bear him down safely, but he wasn’t sure it could bear the additional weight of the stout bodyguard.

Before things erupted into violence, the transformed marquis drew back, and with another pass of his hand returned to his previous appearance. He was polite enough not to grin in their faces, but the mischief still shone in his eyes.

“Was that some sort of illusion?” Milo asked, ignoring the hammering in his chest. “A momentary bending of the fundament?”

“Yes,” the marquis said but raised a warning finger. “But do not confuse an illusion of the Art with a mere trick of the senses. With the Art, my will acted upon you, and your unprepared wills accepted it. If I’d bent to bite, my fangs would have opened your flesh as surely as any beast’s.”

Milo looked at Ambrose, who only gave a bewildered shake of his head.

“Your will acting on ours makes it real, even if you physically didn’t grow finger-long teeth?” Milo asked.

“Precisely,” the marquis confirmed.

“This whole gallery formed because the Art pressed your will on ours to make it,” Milo said, nodding, then his head drew up quickly with an idea. “Is this whole manor part of your will? The whole Lost Vale?”

The marquis beamed down at Milo and bowed his horned head slowly.

“Very good, Magus.”

Ambrose gave a grunt, and Milo and the marquis both turned to see him scratching his whiskered chin, his brows knit in concentration.

“So, if we know this, all of it,” he began, waving his hand to the gallery and the hall, “is just an illusion, why doesn’t it stop being real? If our will has to accept it as true, but now we know it isn’t, why doesn’t it disappear? Or at least, why can’t we see through it?”

“A fair question,” the marquis said gently. “But knowing is not believing. Again, the difference between thoughts and will is the difference between the child blowing dandelion seeds and the wind that propels the man o' war. A life among mortal men has raised your will to believe what your hands touch and your eyes see is real, and you’ve spent some time under my influence knowing it’s real. It takes more than a thought to convince your will to throw off what it believes—especially, if I may be so bold, when it is being affected by a practitioner of the Art as potent as I am. You are shackled to your experience, though with time and concentration, you could break free.”

Ambrose frowned as he nodded in acknowledgment, clearly uncomfortable with the whole business.

“All right, I think I understand the principle,” Milo said, drawing the marquis’ attention back to him. “But as a human, how am I supposed to learn the Art since I’m not a creature of will like fey are?”

“At first blush, I would say you couldn’t,” the fey said, the mischief replaced by scholarly gravitas. “Few humans can muster the certainty and focus to push back against all but the weakest of our kind, and even then, it is only to resist, not to push their own will out. Yet your unique ability to do ghulish magic gives me hope that there is a possibility that with some assistance, you could intuit how to begin mastering the Art.”

“How can I intuit something that is unnatural to me?” Milo asked, despair creeping into the corners of his tone.

The mischievous gleam returned.

“That,” said the marquis, “is precisely where things become very interesting.”

17

The Art

The marquis had offered to transport them to a different portion of the estate, but Ambrose had politely but firmly declined, so they’d spent some time moving through the manor before exiting and heading for the conical dovecote in the expansive courtyard where they’d first met the fey master of the Lost Vale.

“The reason I did not join you at the feast was that I needed time to riddle out this conundrum,” the marquis explained as they strode across the lawn under a huge yellow moon. “As you so keenly observed, Magus, the Art is intuitive and grows with the exercising of that intuition, but how to bridge that gap when the instinct isn’t present?”

Milo felt a growing sense of foreboding the closer they drew to the structure, and not because he expected the marquis’ challenge lay within. There was a vague but familiar sourness to the sight of the building. With each step, he found it more difficult to pay attention to what the marquis was saying.

“As is often the case, the answer was staring me in the face,” the fey said, shaking his head slowly. “After all, the Art is pressing my will upon the world and minds of others, so there was little reason I couldn’t impress some experience, especially upon a willing participant.”

Only a few strides away from the door to the dovecote, Ambrose nudged Milo with an elbow and nodded at the ground. The grass was matted down as though