The Flaw in All Magic (Magebreakers Book 1) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  About the Author

  Sample of Scriber

  THE FLAW IN ALL MAGIC

  By Ben S. Dobson

  Copyright © 2017 Ben S. Dobson

  Cover Art by dleoblack

  All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations used for the purpose of articles or reviews.

  For more information, visit bensdobson.com or join my facebook page at facebook.com/bensdobson. To be notified when a new novel is released, sign up for my mailing list.

  For Abby and James, who remind me constantly of the power of imagination (and who are way too young right now to actually read this book).

  Prologue

  _____

  SOMEONE WAS IN the room with her.

  Allaea Hesliar was digging through the endless shelves of the artifice workshop for an uninscribed copper sheet when she heard the footsteps. No one else should have been there. It was after midnight, and she was working long past her scheduled hours.

  “Indree? Is that you?” Of course it was. Who else would it have been? Indree’s constable badge got her past the workshop wards, and lately she’d decided that Allaea was putting too many hours into the airship project. Come to drag me into the fresh air again, no doubt. “I’m back here.”

  No answer, but the footsteps started in her direction. The funny thing was, they weren’t coming from the entrance, but from further inside. Had Indree come in and headed for the worktables at the back without Allaea hearing? Unusual—elven ears didn’t miss much. But then, she had been absorbed in her work.

  Allaea sighed. The last thing she needed just then was Indree’s mothering. The heating glyphs for the airship’s envelope were still less efficient than she liked, and final inscription had to be done tomorrow in preparation for the launch, only two days away. She’d already submitted her spell diagram for the evening deadline, but a better solution had come to her that night as she’d lain awake in bed. If she could have it done by morning, she could still get Dean Brassforge to approve the change. All that was left was to test a working mock-up. What she really needed was a damned copper plate, and they were never where they were supposed to be.

  “You don’t have to keep checking on me, Indree.” She extracted herself from the shelves, stowed several components in the pockets of her topcoat, and went to meet the approaching footsteps. “You’re my dearest friend, and I love you, so please don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re an insufferable nag and I wish we’d never met.”

  It wasn’t Indree.

  Allaea turned the corner to see a man in dark clothes standing before her in the shadowy aisle between shelves. His face was covered by a dark cowl with holes for eyes, like an executioner’s mask.

  She let out a startled yelp and backed away a step. “Who in the Astra are you? This place is off-limits. How did you get in?” There were privileged projects being worked on in the University’s primary artifice workshop, the airship chief among them. No one got by the wards without a properly glyphed badge.

  “You weren’t supposed to be here,” was all the man said. At least, all he said in Audish. He raised a hand, and started to mutter a spell in the lingua magica.

  Allaea spoke the quickest barrier spell she could muster. A sheet of silver-blue energy shimmered into existence in front of her just as the man completed his own spell. Silver flame crashed towards her in a wave that broke against her shield.

  Spellfire. He was throwing spellfire. If it touched her, it would melt the flesh from her bones in an instant. He’s actually trying to kill me.

  She couldn’t hold her hasty shield much longer under that kind of assault. It was already failing.

  Allaea turned, and ran.

  “Help!” she shouted, for the guards or for Indree—and she wished more than anything that Indree had come, now. She would have known what to do. She was a constable, trained in combat magic. Allaea knew ancryst machines inside and out, but she’d been lucky to get that shield up at all, and any other spell that might help seemed to have deserted her. “Help me! There’s someone in here!”

  She raced down aisles of shelves, darting through whatever gap brought her closer to the exit. Her legs ached, and she was moving too fast for the tight corners—she had to yank herself around by the edges of the shelves, dislodging gems and components. A trail of fallen artifice pieces littered the floor behind her.

  She could hear him following, quick footsteps against the stone floor. He was chanting in the lingua again, readying a spell to burn her alive. From somewhere deep in the workshop behind came a distant howling, with an icy crackle behind it that sent a chill through her blood. What in the Astra was that? She didn’t want to find out.

  Her lungs burned and her breath came in short, terrified gasps, but she was nearly at the door. Just around the next corner, and then…

  She put her foot down wrong; her ankle turned, and she stumbled sidelong against a shelf. She put her hand out to catch herself, and knocked over a collection of iron rods and copper plates—there they were.

  No, no, no. She had to keep moving, couldn’t afford this. Panicked, she risked a look over her shoulder.

  He rounded the corner behind her, still chanting. Lifted his hand.

  Allaea screamed as silver flame roared over her skin and dissolved her sight.

  Chapter One

  _____

  TANE CARVER KNEW something was wrong the moment the clock began to chime.

  It was the students. There weren’t enough of them. Normally the clock atop Thalen’s Hall tolling the hour would have sent hundreds of young humans and elves and gnomes and more scurrying to their classes, but today the campus was nearly empty. A few dozen students scattered about, and that was all.

  The University Guard were out in force, though, patrolling the cobbled paths in their silver-on-blue uniforms. Two stood at the entrance to every building, new and old—from the functional brick of the artifice workshops to the ancient stonework of the cathedral-like invocation hall. At every door, guards were stopping what few students approached, making them display laurel wreath badges to identify themselves. Tane hadn’t been back since he’d been expelled two years prior, but unless the University of Thaless had become a prison camp since then, he had to classify that as unusual.

  He felt the familiar high-altitude pressure in his ears that always preceded a sending, and then a voice spoke in his head. “Mister Carver, I’m reading you on campus. Don’t dawdle. I’m waiting.” Liana Greymond, Dean of Divination. Tane had come at her request, though he’d considered refusing—he didn’t much want to hear a lecture on how badly he’d embarrassed the University. Ultimately though, he’d been curious enough to chance it. After two years, she wouldn’t have contacted him without reason.<
br />
  “I know you’re eager to see me, but try to contain yourself, Dean Greymond,” Tane answered without speaking—through her spell, not his own. She’d left the link open, an Astral channel that he had no way to replicate. “You’ll make me blush.”

  A slight pop in his ears as the pressure abated, and Greymond’s presence was gone. He’d been her favorite student once, but even then she’d never had much patience for his sense of humor.

  Tane studied what few students he saw as he walked—without hurrying—toward the divination hall. They mirrored the population of the Audland Protectorate at large, half of them human like him, and half a diverse selection of the magical races: a dwarf here, an elf there, a doll-sized sprite fluttering down the path beside a nine-foot tall ogren. All wore the silver-on-blue laurel wreath badge of the University displayed proudly at the breast of their topcoats. And they all looked so young, though he was only a few years older now than they were.

  Most kept their heads down and walked quickly, avoiding eye-contact, but a small group had gathered on the open grass at the campus center, whispering in hushed tones. Tane didn’t need divination to sense their unease. As he watched, a dwarven man in University Guard uniform approached the little congregation and hurried them on their way with a few words. They moved on without argument.

  What is going on? Tane regretted not asking Dean Greymond while he’d had the chance, but she wouldn’t have answered in any case, not until he was sitting in front of her.

  He was still watching the little group disperse when someone bumped into him.

  “I’m sorry!” A squeaky voice from somewhere near his waist. “I wasn’t watching—Tane?”

  Tane looked down to see a dark-skinned gnomish woman with a broad face and large eyes, her hair arranged in a rather severe bun. For a moment, she flickered before him, her skin and clothes taking on the greens and greys of the grass and cobblestones behind her—the natural gnomish ability to mask themselves with illusion when they didn’t want to be seen.

  “Roona,” he greeted her. “Just when I was beginning to worry they’d replaced everyone I used to know with children.” He’d shared classes with Roona Nackle, though she’d concentrated in invocation and he—ostensibly, at least—in divination. She would have advanced to graduate studies by now. An opportunity he’d never gotten. “You must know what all this is about. If the guards were wearing different colors I’d think the campus had been occupied by an invading army.”

  “I… I’m not sure exactly. Something happened last night, but everyone’s heard a different story. I haven’t…” Roona trailed off and looked rather unsubtly over her shoulder, then fumbled her pocket watch from her waistcoat and gave it a cursory glance. “Listen, Tane, I have to—”

  “Stop talking to me before someone sees you?”

  She had the grace to look sheepish, at least. “I’m sorry. It isn’t personal, it’s just that… people still talk about you, you know, and I’m on the list for a faculty position next year.”

  “I understand.” Tane forced a smile. “The price of infamy. It’s fine. Go.”

  Roona went, a little bit more eagerly than he would have liked. It was hard not to take that personally.

  The divination hall was at the far eastern end of the campus, but it didn’t take him long to cover the rest of the distance. The oppressive mood in the air was making him nervous, not to mention curious, and either one was enough to overpower his admittedly petty desire to make Dean Greymond wait.

  A three-story marble building topped with a brass-domed observatory, the divination hall cast a long shadow across the grass in the pre-noon sun. Outside the main doors, two of the University Guard stood watch: a dark-bearded human man and a stout dwarven woman. Each of them wore a shortsword and a single-shot ancryst pistol at the waist, and a laurel wreath University badge at the breast—though theirs would have different glyphs on the back than the students, allowing them to pass through more secure wards.

  “Badge?” the dwarf asked, eyeing Tane’s frayed waistcoat and rumpled shirt with suspicion.

  “Don’t have one,” said Tane. “I’m Tane Carver. Dean Greymond asked me to come.”

  The human nodded. “Carver, right.” There might have been a flicker of disapproval in the man’s eye, but he didn’t let it enter his voice. “She left word. Go on in. Straight to her office, please.” They pushed open the doors and held them until Tane had passed.

  Inside, the building was lit with globes of magelight hanging from the ceiling, glowing in the familiar silver-blue common to all Astral energy. Tane passed only a few students—for the most part, he heard nothing but the echo of his own footsteps against marble floors.

  Greymond’s office was on the third floor just below the observatory, and the hall leading up to it was empty, save for two guards outside a small study room. One was a short brown-scaled kobold, watching Tane with slitted reptilian eyes, but it was the larger woman who drew his attention—grey-skinned, muscular, easily six and a half feet tall. An orc? They weren’t entirely unheard of on the Audland Isle, but orcs were rare outside their homeland of Sverna at the far north of the Continent. He’d never seen one on campus—they had no affinity for magic whatsoever.

  But no, her features weren’t quite right for an orc, either. She had the size, the greyish skin, the glinting yellow eyes and pointed ears, but her flat nose and protruding jaw weren’t as pronounced as they might have been, and she lacked the short tusks sticking up from her lower lip. Grey-white hair that was almost like fur framed her face, but the similar fur on the back of her hands and arms wasn’t near heavy enough, and while her fingernails were dark and thick, they were no orcish claws. She had to be a half-orc—almost unheard of in the Protectorate, or anywhere else.

  The woman caught him staring and grinned, exposing sharp lupine teeth. Embarrassed, Tane looked away, and walked faster. He heard her chuckling behind him as he moved down the hall.

  It wasn’t far to Dean Greymond’s door. When he raised his hand to knock, it swung open before his knuckles touched wood, leaving him rapping on air.

  “Tane Carver. It has been a long time. Come in.” Liana Greymond was a human woman of a young-looking fifty years, her face only slightly lined beneath short dark hair. She sat behind a desk cluttered with papers, a silver-blue magelight lamp standing at one corner. She didn’t appear to be looking at Tane, but rather somewhere through him. Those faraway eyes were customary for her, as if she was seeing things no one else could.

  She usually was.

  “I hate when you do that,” said Tane. “Let me—”

  “Do something before I respond to it?” Greymond finished. “Why waste the time?” That was a habit of hers. Sometimes she caught glimpses of things a half-second before they happened, and Tane was convinced she enjoyed using that foresight to put people off balance. “Please, take a seat.” She muttered a spell under her breath in the lingua magica and gestured to a chair in front of her desk. It pulled out for him to sit as if drawn by an invisible hand.

  Tane sat, shifting uncomfortably under her appraising eyes. He was suddenly all too aware of what she was seeing: an unkempt, unshaven man of average height and build with untidy brown hair and shabby clothes. His appearance didn’t say much for the life he’d been living since his expulsion, working odd jobs—and not always entirely legal ones—wherever he could peddle his education in magical matters. He hadn’t cared with Roona or the guards, but Liana Greymond had been something of a mentor to him once. He ran two fingers along the watch chain attached to his waistcoat, and then dipped them into his pocket to rub the dented brass watch casing there—a habit, when he was uneasy. It didn’t tick beneath his fingers. There hadn’t been clockwork inside for a long time.

  “I assume this is about… whatever it is making everyone so nervous out there,” he said by way of distraction. “If you’re looking for a good scapegoat, I’ll take the fall, but know that my price isn’t going to be cheap.”

  “Th
is isn’t a laughing matter, Mister Carver,” Greymond said. “I understand you are working as a consultant of sorts, now. On magical matters, proofing spell diagrams and the like. Is that correct?”

  That was a generous way of putting it, but Tane wasn’t about to argue. “You must—”

  “Yes, of course I looked into it before I summoned you. I was simply confirming. You aren’t misrepresenting yourself to anyone as a graduate mage, I hope?” She was peering through him again, a slight furrow of concentration at the corners of her eyes.

  “Are you casting a truth-spell? I’m insulted, Dean Greymond.” Tane smiled innocently. “When have your divinations ever caught me in a lie?”

  Greymond let out a short, sardonic laugh. “I suppose that’s true. Four years as my best student without an ounce of magic to your name, and I never guessed. You know how to evade a divination, I’ll grant you that. But please, humor me.”

  “I haven’t misrepresented anything,” said Tane, and by the look on her face, it passed muster with her divination. It was the truth, this time. “That’s the point. I’m trying to show people that you don’t need to be a mage to understand magic.” It’s usually better if you aren’t, he thought but didn’t say.

  “Yes, I recall the nature of your final dissertation. That’s why I asked you here, in fact. I wish to acquire your services. I’m loathe to say it, but the University has need of your… rather peculiar area of expertise.”

  “In other words, you need me to find a loophole in a spell that your mages can’t.” Tane leaned forward, intrigued. “This is about whatever happened last night, isn’t it?”

  Greymond frowned, her eyes glazing for a brief instant as she searched the Astra for some answer or another, and then she nodded. “What I am about to tell you is not to be shared until the chancellor makes it public. Do you swear to abide by that?”

  “I suppose I have to, don’t I?” said Tane, and he meant it—at least for now. Anything else would have triggered her truth-spell. “I’m not about to leave here without knowing now that you’ve made it so mysterious. And you know I can keep a secret.”