Alchemist Arcanist (The Alchemist Book 5) Read online

  ALCHEMIST ARCANIST

  DAN MICHAELSON

  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

  Chapter 26

  Author’s Note

  Series by Dan Michaelson

  Similar Series by D.K. Holmberg

  CHAPTER ONE

  The air was cold. Biting. It was unlike anything that Sam had felt before. He tried to pull his robe tight around him, but it wasn’t warm enough. It was a simple Academy robe, designed for the comfort of the halls, not for the strange cold they’d traveled to using the conduits.

  “What do you think of this?” Joiner asked.

  He strode toward Sam, his boots crunching across the snow. Sam had never seen snow before, at least not up close. There were parts of the Barlands where snow fell, but it was usually in the peaks, far removed. He never bothered to venture toward those peaks, wanting nothing to do with them.

  “Why did you think to bring me here?”

  “I thought you might be intrigued by this.” Joiner swept his hands around him, waving at the landscape. “You keep wanting to explore those lanterns, and I thought maybe I could show you something of them.”

  Sam shivered. He tried to draw upon the source, and as he did, he could feel it flooding within him. Several different access points were within his reach, and that power bloomed within, but there were no patterns that he knew that would keep him warm. Joiner didn’t seem to have any difficulty though. Maybe there were patterns that would keep him warm, and Sam just had to pay attention to what Joiner was doing.

  The problem for him was that he wasn’t able to see anything. Joiner knew techniques to mitigate Sam’s ability to see the source or even follow the patterns that he used. And because of that, Sam could not track the kind of energy Joiner pulled upon right now.

  “I’m intrigued,” Sam said. “But now I want us to go back.”

  “Oh, we will. But I think we need to keep exploring.”

  Sam followed him. Though he wished he understood just what it was Joiner intended to show him, he knew better. These were the kind of lessons that Sam thought that he needed. After they had fought—and seemingly defeated, however slightly it seemed at the time—Rasan Tel, he had been looking for information about how to reach for more access points.

  “You did well opening the conduit,” Joiner said. “I haven’t been sure how successful you would be with it.”

  “You let me do it anyway?”

  “I think you need the experience. I’m not going to take that from you, especially as the conduit is a means to something more.”

  “Voran,” Sam said.

  Joiner glanced over. “You don’t have to pretend like you haven’t been visiting it.”

  “I have been,” Sam said.

  “Just you?”

  “Tara and me.”

  “You haven’t brought Lilith.” It was a statement, rather than a question, though Joiner sounded as if he were slightly disappointed.

  “I’m worried about what would happen if I were to bring her there,” Sam said.

  “I don’t think you’re the one who’s worried about it, are you?”

  Sam shook his head. “It’s Tara,” he said.

  “I don’t blame Ms. Stone for her concern. Lilith served Rasan Tel. As far as we can tell, she no longer does, but there is always the possibility that she’s keeping something from us.”

  “She’s already kept something from us.”

  “She has,” Joiner agreed. “But it’s not a reason to keep her back. We don’t understand what she’s gone through. I don’t know that we can. But we can try to understand how much she wants to help us.”

  “I understand.”

  “I hope you do, Sam. I may get summoned away to deal with the Nighlan, and if so, I want you to be prepared for the possibility of the danger you may face. I might not be there to help next time.”

  “Again, I understand.”

  “Good. Now why don’t we talk about what we need to do here?” Joiner flashed a smile, and as he did, he motioned to everything around him. “I’d like to see what you can feel. Use the source.”

  “Here?”

  “The source can be used in different ways, Samran. You have used it in ways that the almanac has described before, but what I’m asking from you is something else. I think that we need to find another method for you to be able to reach the source and to understand what’s around you.”

  “Why?” His boots crunched against the snow. They were the only thing that that protected his feet against the cold, and though Sam wished he wore something more that might keep out the chill, he had only the cloak, and that was simply not enough.

  Joiner glanced over to him. “You spent so much time studying and not enough time experiencing.”

  “Because everything I need to learn is in the books in the library. Or if not the library within the Academy, then the library in Voran.”

  Sam had never been to a library like that before. The knowledge that was there was unlike anything he had ever seen. It was incredible. He couldn’t understand most of what was there, at least not yet, but if he could reach for more access points, he had to believe he would be able to. In time. For now, he had to work with the little bit that he could do and try to find some answers.

  “Which is exactly your problem,” Joiner said. “You rely upon what you can read, but you don’t rely upon what you can see or feel. How do you think those first alchemists learned?”

  “I suppose they practiced, experimented, and found a way to uncover the truth.”

  “Something like that,” he said. “Which is what I want from you. If there’s one thing my mentor taught, it’s that there are certain things that I would need to know, and certain things I would need to learn but wouldn’t be able to find in the books within the library. Both the Academy library and the library in Voran. Those answers aren’t there.”

  Sam watched him. The air swirled, carrying faint wisps of snow, and it lifted around him, making it difficult for him to see much of anything. The air was cold and painful. Somehow, Joiner didn’t seem troubled by it.

  Sam continued to follow and then stopped when Joiner stopped.

  “Try it here,” Joiner said. “The longer that you stand here, feeling the energy around you, the more that you can start to feel everything.”

  Sam shrugged, and though the cold swirled around him, he decided that it was worthwhile to at least try. That was what Joiner wanted. He stood and opened himself to the source. That energy filled him.

  It was a flood of power. Sam knew there were ways to constrict it, trying to tighten it so that he didn’t draw upon that power beyond what he needed, but he hadn’t managed to limit it. He could call upon it, but even doing so seemed to challenge him.

  The flood of power filled him. And Joiner looked over, watching him.

  “What are you doing with it?” Joiner asked.

  “I’m trying to decide what I might be able to use it for.”

&nbsp
; “And what can you see?”

  There was a hint of a smile on Joiner’s mouth, a playful expression that made it seem as if he were toying with Sam.

  “I’m trying to feel for whatever power is here,” he said.

  “Fine,” Joiner said. “Let’s assume there is some power here you can reach. And let’s assume that whatever you can do with it will tell you the answers that you need. Now what are you going to do?”

  “How am I supposed to do it?”

  “That’s the question that I’m asking you,” Joiner said. “You have a torrent of the source. I can feel it sliding off of you. And I suspect you are already starting to reach for one of the other access points, aren’t you?”

  As a matter of fact, Sam had been.

  “And in doing so, what else have you been testing?”

  “I’ve been testing whether there were ways for me to feel anything here.”

  “Have you?”

  “Maybe I haven’t.” He shrugged. “Again, I’m not exactly sure what you want from me.”

  Joiner turned to Sam. He crossed his arms over his chest. It seemed as if his robes did not move in the wind the way that Sam’s robes did. “How long have you been at the Academy?”

  “Almost a year,” Sam said.

  “And how much have you learned in your classroom sessions?”

  “Almost nothing.”

  “How much have you learned in the library?”

  “Everything.”

  Joiner jabbed Sam in the chest. He shook his head. “Not everything. You learned many things. But you haven’t learned everything. Think of your experience with the Nighlan. When you’ve encountered the Nighlan, what did it take to stop them?”

  “It took what I learned in the library,” he said.

  “When they broke into the Academy, what did you do?”

  Sam shrugged. “I suppose I added a tracing of the source into the patterns that Havash and some of the others had placed throughout the Study Halls, trying to lock the Nighlan off so that they couldn’t reach there.”

  “And did you read about that in any book?”

  “No,” he said.

  “As you continue to progress and attempt to deal with Rasan Tel, you are going to find that there are certain things you will need to do to stop him. You will also find there are things that you won’t be able to do to stop him. There are some answers in the books that you can read. Voran is a good starting point. But it’s complicated, as I’m sure you’ve seen.”

  “Because not all knowledge is there. That’s the point you’re trying to make.”

  “Because Rasan Tel knows things that we don’t,” Joiner said. “The only way that I had a chance of countering him was because he was partially imprisoned. Had he not been, I doubt that I would’ve been able to do much against him. Even with that partial imprisonment, he was nearly too much for me. It took you, Sam, to help limit his ability.”

  “Then how can I have a chance of stopping him if you can’t?” Sam’s shoulders slumped at the idea.

  “Because you also have experienced parts of the world that he hasn’t. I am confident that you can do this, Sam. You just need to take time to try to figure out what it is that you will need to do, and then try to find if you can do it well enough to overpower him.” He turned in place, holding his hands out, and swept them around himself in a tight circle. “I am optimistic you can do that. Now, I would like us to try again.”

  “And then want?”

  “And then we will keep trying until you can tell me something that you have uncovered that you didn’t know before.”

  “And if I can’t?”

  “Then Rasan Tel and the Nighlan may already have won.”

  Sam turned away and began to focus, feeling for the source and using it in a faint pattern that he sent swirling around him. In doing so, he looked at Joiner, watching him and wondering if he might say something that would help Sam understand, but there wasn’t. This was something Sam was going to have to do on his own.

  Was he right?

  Maybe he was. Maybe Sam was too reliant upon what he learned in the library and not enough on what he experienced on his own. There were things that he had discovered on his own, things that he would never have learned from the books within the library, but it was what he had learned in the library that had helped him manage that.

  He found Joiner watching him even more intently, and he couldn’t tell if the man was pleased with himself or annoyed with Sam. Maybe it was both. He focused on the source and tried to call that power to him, but already he could tell that some aspect of it wasn’t going to work the way that he needed it to. Already, Sam could tell that he wasn’t going to satisfy whatever it was that Joiner wanted from him. The source seemed to be slipping away.

  And if he couldn’t, maybe it meant that he would fail.

  If he did, they all might.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “He brought you where?” Tara asked, leaning over the table. Her voice was nothing more than a whisper.

  “Out into some ice field,” Sam muttered. The inside of the library was quiet. This was the Academy library, not Voran, though they had spent time in both lately. “He said that I needed to learn something outside of the library.”

  “Well, maybe there’s something to that,” she said. “But it seems to me an odd way for him to teach that. Why bring you there?”

  “The better question is how he brought me there,” Sam said. “There were no lanterns. At least, not that I saw.”

  “But you said you were the one who carried you.”

  “I did, but he nudged, if that makes any sort of sense.”

  “I suppose that it does. It would be the same as if I were to nudge.”

  “Or Rasan Tel,” Sam said.

  They were careful to use his name only in places where they were certain no one else could hear. Not that saying it gave him power, but they didn’t want other people raising questions about Rasan Tel, who he was, and what he might do to them.

  “We could ask her,” Sam suggested, reluctant to say her name to Tara.

  Tara frowned. “You can ask her whatever you want,” she said. “But I’m not going to be involved.” She sat up and pulled the books closer to her. They were books on advanced angulation and had been borrowed from the restricted section at Havash’s insistence, offering her resources that she wouldn’t have been able to reach otherwise. At least, not technically reach. They were able to get into the restricted section by using the Study Halls, but they tried not to do so any longer. Now that there were more people who understood that the Study Halls were there, they didn’t enjoy the same privacy that they once had.

  “You seem so upset by her,” he said.

  “Well, if you really considered what she’s done to you, you might be upset as well. But you let yourself get caught up in other aspects, and you ignored the things she did to you, so maybe you can’t.”

  “Tara—”

  Tara stood, grabbing the books and appearing ready to leave. “I’m going to go get some food and then maybe some rest. You can go and talk to her all you want, and maybe see if she can’t give you some secrets.” She stormed away.

  Sam leaned back and glanced around the library. It was quiet, as it often was at this time of day. Sam had returned to his classes in the Academy after having confronted Rasan Tel, but his classes had begun to challenge him in ways that they hadn’t before. Not through the material that he was expected to learn—Sam had already mastered what he thought he would need to know in order for him to pass on to the second year. It was more about what he had to do to keep alert in those classes. They bored him. Any time he tried to approach Havash, he found his request ignored.

  Tara had no sympathy for him. Whenever he talked to her about how he felt, she made a point of reminding him that she had gone through something similar. She had felt the same boredom when she had been in his level and then every other year since. He supposed that he understood that. She had struggled, bu
t perhaps it was for a different reason than he knew.

  But Sam wondered if he could put up with the classes for the remainder of the year. He didn’t want to leave the Academy. At least, he didn’t want to leave the Academy just yet, especially as he felt like he was finally coming to terms with his place. It wasn’t in the main part of the Academy, though. What he needed instead was to gain an understanding of what he might be able to learn when he spent time in the alchemy tower.

  Alchemy was what he wanted to master. Alchemy was what he needed to master.

  And he believed that Tara understood, especially as he believed that she knew the truth, but she wanted to keep him in classes, or at least around her classes, until she was done with the Academy.

  She was close. She had to finish this year, take whatever tests were involved in that, and then she could pass on. Sam knew the tests involved proving to each of the masters that students had accomplished what the instructors wanted of them in each of the topics—and not only in the arcane arts. There were times when he thought that he might be able to pass some of those tests now, though not all of them. And despite how he remembered nearly everything he read, he would never be able to demonstrate true arcane arts, and so might never be able to graduate the way that Tara inevitably would.

  Sam had not asked her what she would do once she graduated from the Academy. They had talked about it before, and he knew that there was a time when she had wanted to be a part of the Tavran Council, but that desire had shifted as well. He had seen her concern about how she’d been involved in the war with the Nighlan, and yet he wasn’t sure whether that was still the case. She had willingly gone into battle with him.