Alchemist Illusion (The Alchemist Book 3) Read online

  Alchemist Illusion

  The Alchemist Book 3

  Dan

  D.K. Holmberg

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Author’s Note

  Series by Dan Michaelson

  Similar Series by D.K. Holmberg

  Chapter One

  The vrandal remained dim as it rested in Sam’s hand, absent of its usual light. He traced his fingers along the fine contours and smooth metal surface, feeling a hint of residual warmth in it. It left him with a sense of the power he could command through it.

  “Are you just going to stare at it?” Tara asked.

  Sam looked up. This room was one of the few places in the Academy where he truly felt comfortable. A wall of books lined one end of the room, a desk stacked with papers on the opposite side. A pair of cushioned chairs angled toward each other, far more ornate than any he’d ever been allowed to use.

  Tara sat across from him, her black hair pulled back, leaving her angular jawline framed in such a way he couldn’t help but admire. She had a hint of lavender to her today, a scent he’d become far more aware of when he’d gone blind.

  “I’m amazed I can take the vrandal on and off,” Sam admitted.

  “Daven said that would be possible when you began to master the power within it.”

  Sam studied the vrandal again. He understood how to remove the device, and there wasn’t the same fear that he couldn't put it back on, though he didn’t fully understand the alchemy trapped within it. He thought he might be able to utilize some power, but as he didn’t have any arcane arts, it was more difficult for him.

  “I can see that look on your face,” Tara said. “And I know that you still question whether you have any arcane arts.”

  He smiled tightly. “I’m starting to feel like it might be possible.”

  In his mind, that was progress. The idea that he might have some access to the arcane arts felt like acknowledging that the sun wasn’t going to rise. Only in this case, he couldn’t help but believe it. Everything that he had seen and experienced had told him that the kind of power within the vrandal was tied to more than just alchemy. To use it the way that he had, he must have some connection to the arcane arts. The challenge for Sam was in finding it.

  He took a deep breath and looked down at the almanac. “We should keep working at this. We don’t have much time before classes begin, and I don’t want Havash to get mad about us spending so much time here.”

  Tara frowned as she looked around the old alchemy common room. “Nobody uses this place. I don’t think that he would even care. At least until they open the tower back up.”

  Sam hadn’t considered that before but didn’t think that it was that likely.

  “Will they?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. They’ve had it closed for so long that it’s hard to know. Eventually, the fifth tower will need to reopen. Especially now that we know it wasn’t some alchemy failure but an actual attack.”

  Sam stared at the almanac. The book was massive, covered with thick leather binding with symbols for alchemy worked into the surface of it, and each page was a complicated series of runes that he had managed to get lost in while trying to interpret.

  “I kind of like the privacy.”

  Tara chuckled. “Just because they reopen the alchemy tower doesn’t mean you won’t have privacy. Besides, the library will reopen soon, and then we can go back there.”

  He nodded. The library was useful, and he didn’t intend to be able to stay here indefinitely. This wasn’t his tower. More than that, there were other places within the Academy that he could go and have the privacy he wanted.

  “Do you want to keep working at this?” Tara asked.

  “I want to try,” Sam said. “I just wanted to make sure you wanted to.”

  Tara grabbed the vrandal and pulled it off his palm, then slipped it onto her hand. She held it out, admiring it. “The construction of it really is quite pretty.”

  “Pretty?”

  “It’s almost delicate. I can see why you like it so much. Delicate suits you.” She grinned and passed it back to him.

  Sam chuckled. “I seem to think you like my delicate hands.”

  “They have their benefits.”

  He slipped the vrandal back onto his hand, and he formed the pattern that he had learned would activate power out of it. He had discovered three distinct patterns when it came to the vrandal. There was one that allowed green energy to build within it, and if he focused the right way, he could explode that power away from him defensively and protectively. There was the way that he activated the vrandal when it came to using the almanac. That was merely a matter of tapping his fingers in a small but steady rhythm. And then there was the other use of the vrandal, one that he hadn’t fully come to understand. If he held almost perfectly still, he could feel the way that power began to build in it, and then once he moved, lines of power flowed from the vrandal.

  It was that use of the vrandal which had him the most hopeful.

  He couldn’t use the arcane arts like Tara, but when he saw that flowing from the vrandal, Sam couldn’t help but feel as if it were something similar to angulation.

  “Are you ready?” he asked softly.

  Tara nodded.

  Sam pulled the almanac over to him and leaned back. He flipped through the pages, trying to find a pattern that might be beneficial to them. He didn’t know which ones would work, though as far as he could tell, most of them were effective in a specific manner, as long as he used the proper patterns.

  The common room had changed in the time that he had started coming down here.

  Havash had begun to place books here, turning it into a library of sorts, but all on alchemy. Most of these books had been in the library, and Sam had read through them—which meant that he had memorized most of them—but there were a few that he had not seen before when Pat gave him a moment of excitement until he realized that they were more basic texts. It was almost as if Havash planned to restore the tower to what it had once been.

  As Sam worked through the almanac, looking for something that might keep them safe during another attack, he found one in a particular type of pattern. He paused for a moment. He set the vrandal down atop the almanac, studying the pages, and skimmed it for a while. He had already read most of these books . As soon as he learned there was some hidden secret within the almanac, Sam had tried to work through as much as he could, wanting to master everything within the almanac as much as possible.

  He could recite most of it. There hadn’t been that many books that had challenged him nearly as much as the almanac did.

  “I’m waiting,” Tara said.

  Sam nodded. The energy of the vrandal flowed out of his hand and into the page. It seemed as if there was a considerable power to it, and as he let it flow into the page, the markings in the almanac shifted and became legible.

  “Are you ready?” he asked.

  Tara nudged him. “How could I not be?”
>
  He glanced over; she was glowing softly with arcane arts. The pale white light radiated from her and drifted outward, leaving a swirling pattern around her he knew to be significant. The power was enough that he couldn’t only see it, but he felt it too. When he’d lost his sight, his connection to power like that had intensified to the point where he was much better able to detect it. Once his vision had returned, he’d been able to retain his sharpened skills.

  “As it so often does, it speaks of accessing the source,” Sam said, looking over to Tara. When they had first started reading it, he and Tara had tried to make sense of what it meant by the source, and neither of them really knew. When using angulation, there was no specific source. It was simply a matter of accessing the arcane arts. Perhaps it was tied into the zero tenet, but neither of them knew for certain. “But once you access the source, it starts to talk about letting the power flow out at thirty degrees, mixing with an angulated line at forty-five degrees, and then waiting until the two coincide,” he said.

  It was a complicated use of angulation already, but that was just the beginning.

  Were it anyone other than Tara, Sam wasn’t sure that they would be able to do it. Most students at the Academy wouldn’t have an understanding of advanced angulation like she did. And this was most definitely advanced.

  “I’m ready,” she said.

  “I can’t tell if you have let the arcane arts flow at thirty degrees.”

  She frowned at him. “You can see that I am doing so.”

  “Are you sure I can?”

  “Don’t play games like that, Sam. Not about your vision, not after what we went through before.”

  He laughed, holding his hand over the surface of the almanac. The vrandal continued to glow with soft green light, and he waved his hand above the page. “Once you have the source,” he continued, “you need to create a linear connection that leads outward at ninety degrees before you invert it and begin to layer a second connection that abstracts with the first at an angle of thirty-one degrees.”

  The way she used her arcane arts was incredibly complicated. And it was different than simply reading about it. It was one thing to read about the use of angulation, even complicated angulation, in theoretical terms, and something else to actually put it into practical application. That was where he tended to come up short. Sam was smart. He knew that about himself. He lacked any ability to use any sort of angulation, basic or not, so that he had no idea how difficult it would be for her to create the pattern that he described. It almost felt like he was taking an advanced seminar where he couldn’t do anything.

  “I have that completed,” Tara said. Her voice was tighter than it had been, and she clenched her jaw slightly as if struggling against the effort of whatever power she was trying to maintain.

  Would she have enough strength for what came next? Tara was gifted with the arcane arts, but Sam could feel the effort she put into it, and he could feel the power she exerted.

  “Go on,” she said.

  Sam turned his attention to the almanac, scrolling along the lines written there. “When you have it secured, add a third curvilinear connection, this one with a slight fifteen-degree angulation on the distal end…”

  She gritted her teeth. “Keep going.”

  Sam continued reading the instructions, focusing on the way to angulated power, letting that flow out from her. As he often did, he could see the power. There was a pale glowing light that came off of her. It was the white energy that he attributed to the arcane arts, something that he had been able to see from his sister for as long as he remembered.

  Tara tensed the longer that she worked on the pattern that he described. He could see the tension in her eyes, the set to her jaw, and the angulated lines of power that she was letting flow from her.

  Finally, he was done. White light radiated from her and surged brightly, then it washed outward and streamed away. A wall of power solidified, separating them.

  Sam got to his feet, stepping toward it. Though he tried to push through the wall by holding his vrandal outward, he couldn’t penetrate it. Stepping to the side didn’t seem to make a difference. Doing so put him on the other side of Tara, but it didn’t let him see her, almost as if the wall made it so that the power she held formed a thin line and obscured her completely. This was incredible.

  The white line shimmered for a moment before fading and collapsing in an explosion of power.

  Tara wiped her hand across her brow. “That’s about as much as I can withstand. I might be able to hold onto more, but it’s going to take time for me to recover.” She leaned back in the chair, looking around the room. “What did it look like?”

  “It didn’t look like much. Are you sure you did anything?” he teased.

  She blinked, running her hand across her brow again. “Are you sure? It felt like something.”

  Sam laughed. “It was impressive. The power seemed to surround you. It hid you in a way I hadn’t seen before, almost as if you disappeared into it.”

  “It’s the angulation. That’s the difficult part of the whole thing. I think I can use those angles differently, but it’s how exact they are that makes it the hardest for me.”

  “It was a barrier, but not invisible.”

  “I don’t think it was meant to be invisible, though it was from my side.” She nodded. “Transparent. I saw you get up. That’s why I was surprised when you tried to tell me you couldn’t see anything.”

  “Then it’s a shield.”

  Tara frowned and took a deep breath as she leaned forward. “I guess it would be. That kind of thing would be useful in facing off against someone like Ferand or even—”

  “We shouldn’t be the ones facing off against them.”

  “I know we shouldn’t, but since I’ve met you, I’ve been in more battles than I ever thought I’d see.”

  Sam shrugged. “At least I’m not boring.”

  She smiled and leaned forward again, once more starting to glow. The power she pulled was the same as before, though this time, she didn’t need him to walk her through it. Tara really was gifted, and with her memory and knowledge of the power she had drawn on in the past, she was able to recreate anything they had already done.

  The shield formed again, this time appearing in front of her, solidifying quickly. Sam got to his feet and made his way around the barrier, studying how she held it and searched for weaknesses. He pressed his hand out, using the vrandal to test whether it would withstand something like that. The energy along the surface sizzled for a moment, then faded.

  He circled her. Tara turned, and the shield followed. The same power flowed out from her, filling the shield as it formed. Then it sputtered before finally failing.

  She sat back, running her hands across her face. “That’s a lot harder than it sounds.”

  “You mean drawing on three lines from the source, curving them in complicated angulation, and multiplying the connection within them isn’t easy?”

  Tara started to smile. “It’s somewhat reminiscent of when I had been taking my advanced angulation seminar with the Grandam. You know, before we realized that she was evil and working with the Nighlan.”

  Sam chuckled. “It's quite a bit different than what is discussed in the first-year angulation class.”

  “That’s because this is not first-year angulation. This isn’t even Academy angulation.” She glanced over to the books in the shelves around them before looking back to him. “Think about some of the books that you found in the library, Sam. They talk about theoretical use of angulation, and when you get far enough into them, they start to speak of various patterns that can be applied —”

  “I know,” he said.

  She snorted. “I’m sure you do. You probably have more of those patterns memorized than I do.”

  “Not that it’s much use for me.”

  “Not yet,” she said, a little heat in her voice. “But while we learn the concepts that this includes, there is something much more e
xacting about how this has to be applied. I’ve been practicing so that I can do this, and even with that practice, it takes so much concentration that I’m not even sure I can use it the way that I want.”

  “You’re doing well,” Sam said.

  “I suppose in doing as well as needed,” she muttered, shaking her head. “And until Havash decides to come down here, or Kal knows, one of the angulation instructors, you are stuck with me.”

  “It’s not so much stuck,” he said. “And I would much rather have you here than somebody like Professor Clarice.”

  She started to smile. “Can you even imagine what that would be like?”

  “Not so much,” he said. “And now, after what we’ve been through, she thinks that I am far more capable than I actually am.”

  “I think everybody who knows what you’ve done realizes that you are more capable than you do,” she said. “At least, with everything other than this one part of the arcane arts. And that will come, too.”

  “It will,” he said.

  She looked at him as if trying to decide whether or not he truly believed.

  They both knew that was one aspect of accessing the arcane arts. For those who had it, they already believed. If their magic suddenly manifested, the way that Mia’s had, or even Tara, when she had been incredibly young, there was no difficulty with the belief. But others needed to find a way to come up with their own belief system. It was considered the zero tenet of angulation, whereas belief was tied to using that power. Sam hadn’t believed, mostly because he had never had reason to, but increasingly he was finding himself believing that there might be something that he could do when it came to the arcane arts.