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  “Flink,” he said. “You know the ointments that you make for your spear? The ones that give it effects?”

  “It’s called potion making,” she said.

  “Can you show me how to do it?”

  “It’s not that simple, Newchie. It takes years to know which herbs do what, and which leaves you can pick and crush and mix. You can’t learn it in a day.”

  “Is there anything around here you can use?”

  “Let me see.”

  Flink moved around the clearing, inspecting every leaf, every bit of flora she could find. She tugged at roots, gently tore plants from the ground, until she’d gathered a handful of the stuff, a mix of different shaped leaves, different colored herbs.

  She piled them on the ground and sat cross-legged in front of them. She took a miniature ceramic pestle and bowl from her bag. The bowl was cracked from the impact of the ship crash, but it remained whole.

  She put some leaves in the bowl and then smashed them with her pestle, sending an herby, thyme-like fragrance out. Charlie’s stomach growled.

  She mixed and smashed and crushed, and she sent Charlie to the stream to collect water. She mixed this with her concoctions, until soon she had a gloopy mess in of green and brown in her bowl.

  “The plants here aren’t so much different than back home,”” she said. “You just need to know what to look for.”

  “And this is an ointment? It’s ready?”

  She nodded. “This one will paralyse muscles. If you spread it on your blade, then whatever you stab won’t be able to move.”

  She put the mixture into an empty vial and handed it to him, and Charlie put it in his coat pocket.

  After that, she used the remaining herbs to mix something else, smiling proudly when she was done. She vialled it and handed it to Charlie.

  “What does this one do?”

  “It’s a surprise,” she said, mischievously. “Use it when you really get in trouble. Drink it, but not all of it. Too much is dangerous.”

  With his two vials of blade ointment, he felt a little better. If it came down to it, he could use the ointment on his blades, and it’d mean he could at least do some damage without using magic.

  Even so, he wanted a way to wield spells without Larynk’s god sphere. And that was why he’d brought Papa Gully here.

  “Gully,”” he said.

  The old man snorted mid-snooze. Unbelievably, he’d slept through the owl attack. He sat up. “What now?” he said.

  “I need your help,” said Charlie.

  “My hunting days are over, I’m afraid, lad. My back, you see.”

  “Yeah, your incredibly broken back. I need you to teach me magic.”

  “But I’ve seen you use it already.”

  “Real magic, Gully. Like you use. Your magic still works here, right? Even away from your planet. You don’t need Larynk’s sphere to use it.”

  Gully nodded. “Come here,” he said.

  Charlie sat beside him. Gully grabbed a stick. He drew a symbol in the dirt, a triangle with a small flame in the centre.

  “This is a rune,” he said. “See the triangle? Shapes are incredibly important in magic. In fact, in life. Shapes and patterns are everywhere, though you might not see them most of the time, because you aren’t looking. Life has a geometry, and there’s a reason for it. If you know where to look, where to find the shapes, you can draw power from them. You call it mana, but it’s really something else. A power held in everything.”

  “If I learn rune shapes, I can use real magic?”

  “You’re on the right lines, but not quite. It’s one thing seeing the shapes, and another using them. Powers gifted by a god are worthless. That’s why my magic works here, and yours only works when Larynk allows it. Your magic is a gift, mine was earned.”

  At this, Gully put his hands in front of him. He rolled up the sleeves of his robe and turned his hands over, to show his palms and forearms. They were covered in dozens of scars, deep red lines that formed triangles, squares, hexagons, and some shapes that Charlie had never seen before.

  “These are a bind,” he said. “Every spell I know is a part of me. To learn fire, I had to watch the shape of it for days, for weeks, until it seared deep in my mind, until it was a part of me. And then I had to gouge the shape into my flesh to deepen the bond.”

  “You’re saying I have to sit and watch things for weeks?”

  “The shape of fire, the shape of water, the shape of the wind.”

  “Wind doesn’t have a shape.”

  “To a mage, it does. Watch it for long enough, and you’ll see it.”

  “How can I see the wind?”

  “By watching, Charlie. You’re not understanding, because your mind isn’t trained to it; I started learning when I was a boy, and it took me five years of studying rocks to learn a simple spell to wield their power. As I practiced, the time lessened. It would take you years to learn your first spell the way I can learn them.”

  Another dead end. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to work. Call him lots of things, but lazy wasn’t one of them. He didn’t have years to learn how to summon rocks or how to wield fire without Larynk’s help. He didn’t have years to learn how to find herbs and mix potions. He didn’t even have weeks.

  The thing he didn’t understand was, if the god Chummilk created Gully’s planet, then he must also have created its magic system. So how did Gully retain his spells, while Charlie had to rely on Larynk’s sphere?

  “What are you guys doing here?” said a voice.

  Crosseyes walked into the clearing, his golden skin covered in mud, a vine hanging from one of the katanas on his hip. The guy wore his style well. It reminded Charlie of a Western gunslinger, the kind he’d idolised when he was growing up. Gun-toting, tobacco-chewing free spirits who only cared about whiskey pistols, and gold. The question was, where had a demi-god seen enough westerns to imitate the style? But, along with third nipples, it was a subject he’d have to ask about later because there were more important things. Like, had Crosseyes been watching them?

  “Us?” said Charlie. “We’re earning legacy. What are you doing here?”

  “Collecting wood for the ship. I had to come all the way out here; pickings are slim near the village.”

  “There are trees everywhere. You didn’t need to come out here.”

  “I can’t just go chopping things down or snapping branches off trees. I have to find ones already on the ground, ones the trees have already surrendered.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Karma, Charlie. If I take from the trees without asking, then I owe them something in return. You can’t just take things; everything has a balance, and you can’t take without giving.”

  Branches cracked outside of the clearing. Charlie’s instincts pricked, but Flink’s were faster, and she was already on her feet, her spear ready.

  Charlie sent out a wave of Detect Evil. When a map formed in his mind, he saw six dots circling them, prowling back and forth, but never getting too close.

  “Wolves,” he said. “They’re back. Six of them now.”

  Crosseyes drew his twin katanas. As he did, a shape crashed toward him, a hulking mass of muscle and fur, a snarling wolf with its jaws open and pointed, yellowed teeth lining its mouth. Another jumped toward him, then a third.

  The metal skinned demi-god slashed out with his katana, cutting one wolf across the belly. He ducked, rolled and then twisted away, every movement a lesson in agility, and he slashed this way and that with his sword until it became not a fight but a dance, his graceful moves punctuated by slashes of his sword and cries of pain from the wolves. It took just five seconds, and all three wolves were dead.

  That was when Charlie heard growls behind him. When he stood and looked, he found another wolf staring back at him, its auburn fur on edge, saliva dripping from its angry mouth.

  With no time to think, he fired a spell on instinct, sending out a scattering of fire arrows. Seeing the flames speeding to
ward it, the wolf took off, fleeing into the forest.

  In the distance, there was a cracking sound that sounded like sparks flying. Charlie approached the treeline, and he saw that five hundred metres away, one of his fire arrows had hit a blue tree square. The square dimmed, and then Charlie watched in horror as the dimness began to spread from tree to tree, until soon, the blue glows were gone completely.

  He’d shorted the forest defence system. He’d only been here a day, and he’d already screwed with the planetary defence. Ozkar was not going to be happy.

  “We better go,” he said. “I need to warn Ozkar about what I’ve done before Serpens finds out and loses his head.”

  “We’ve come all the way out here, and now we’re going to go back?”

  “Serpens put Ozkar in charge of making his defence. And he’s a little crazy. If we get back soon enough, I can tell him what happened, and he can probably fix it before Serpens finds out.”

  They left the clearing and headed back to the village. Charlie’s mood had turned sour now, having failed to effectively fight without using his powers, and realizing that he’d have to study years to get the skills Flink and Gully had. On top of that, he’d broken a slightly-demented god’s forest defence. Not a great day.

  He picked up his pace a little until he walked beside Crosseyes. “That was amazing back there,” he told him. “How did you move like that?”

  “Practice,” Crosseyes told him.

  “Do you think you could teach me?”

  “It’d take years to be half as good as me with a sword.”

  There it was again – the idea that nothing came easy. Not potion making and alchemy, not spells, not blade fighting.

  “Maybe you could teach me the basics. Just enough that I can practice them on my own.”

  “You want me to train you, huh?”

  Charlie showed him his daggers. “I want to use these without relying on magic.”

  “Maybe I could give you some pointers. But remember what I said? Karma and balance? Everything has a cost.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “Larynk trusts you, doesn’t he?”

  Charlie didn’t see where this was going, but he didn’t like it. “I think so. As much as he trusts anyone.”

  “I need to use his sphere. Just for a minute or two.”

  “For what? Can a demi-god even use a god’s sphere?”

  “Maybe use was the wrong word. I want to spheregaze.”

  Larynk had told them what spheregazing was; it was when a god looked into another god’s sphere. It was a sign of trust. What did Crosseyes expect to see in Larynk’s sphere? What did he want to find?

  It couldn’t have been anything good. Otherwise, Crosseyes would have just asked Larynk.

  “I don’t think I can do that,” said Charlie.

  “Suit yourself.”

  “What do you want to see, anyway?”

  “You’ll think it’s stupid,” said Crosseyes.

  “Try me.”

  “Larynk was around when I became a demi-god. That was centuries ago, and I’ve forgotten most of my old life. I just want to see it again. I want to see my old family, my old town. Just for a minute or two. Whatever Larynk sees, the memories are stored in his sphere. It’s just a bit of harmless nostalgia.”

  Charlie said nothing after that. He needed to think about it. It used to take him five minutes to order in Starbucks, and now he was chewing on a deal offered by a demi-god, which required him to double-cross a fully-fledged god. His life was getting more and more complicated.

  Chapter Ten

  Thirty minutes after getting back to the village, he was still so full of adrenaline that his hands shook. His forehead felt clammy, and even in the safety of the village he thought he saw movement out of the corners of his eyes, as if a raging owl or hungry wolf was going to come crashing toward him.

  It all seemed so natural to the others; forests were a second home to Flink even on an alien planet, and Gully had been so relaxed that he’d snoozed through an owl fight. When faced with three wolves Crosseyes had just waltzed through them, giving a very real meaning to Dances with Wolves.

  All in all, it hadn’t ranked as one of his best days. Guilt twisted in his stomach when he thought about how he’d inadvertently shorted Ozkar’s defence system. On the way back to the village, he’d tried casting Mend on the broken sphere, but nothing had happened.

  He had decided that the only thing he could do was tell Ozkar, and to say that hadn’t gone down well was an understatement.

  The villagers had already treated their new arrivals with disdain, but it turned into outright contempt when Charlie explained what happened. Now, five of them trundled off toward the forest, led by Ozkar who directed them in his fake exotic accent.

  When they disappeared into the treeline, Charlie headed into a dragonstone dwelling that the villagers had reluctantly allowed them to use. Inside were five hay-stuffed sheets for them to sleep on, one for each of them including Crosseyes, though the demi-god preferred to sleep on his ship. Larynk, as a god, didn’t need to sleep, so he’d given up his sheet for Apollo. The god preferred to sit outside the dwelling while the rest of them slept, staring yearnfully at the dark sky, no doubt wishing he was on the safety of his own planet.

  In the corner of the room was a table, and set on it were two jugs of water and five metal plates that the villagers had donated to them to eat from. Again, it seemed that Larynk and Crosseyes had no need for food, which was all the better for the rest of them.

  He propped one metal plate on the table so it leaned against the wall, casting a hazy reflection back at him. Damn, his face was a mess. Deep cuts lined his cheeks, only disappearing when they met his beard, which had a few patches missing. Dried blood crusted around the cuts, and it made him wince even to look at them.

  He tipped some water onto his hand and started to clean the wounds, gasping at the pain when water met cut flesh. He could have used heal, of course, but there was something he enjoyed about the pain; each sting pushed his thoughts back a little, brought him away from dwelling on them and back to the moment. He was starting to enjoy everything he could do that didn’t rely on magic, because it made him feel more in control. As stupid as it was, washing the blood from his face without using magic made him feel better.

  In a weird way, just knowing that he could cast Heal, that the option was there, already made him feel better. It was in his head, course, because without casting heal, then the magic wouldn’t heal him. It was a placebo, like when he was younger and he was on the school sprint team.

  He’d always been fast, but he remembered one specific race where one of the other sprinters from another school, a kid named Henny Alltop, had a reputation of being faster that a dog with a flea-bitten ass. Every time Charlie looked at Henny, he felt his stomach sink a little. Then, when warm-ups started, he just couldn’t get going. His legs felt like bricks, the track was covered in treacle. He was slow as hell.

  So, Mum told him that he was just dehydrated, and she gave him a water bottle. He saw her put a pill in it, and she told him at was jammed with fast-acting vitamins, so he’d run faster. He was young and stupid enough to believe her back then, and what do you know…it worked. He beat Henny and smashed his own personal best. It was only after the race that she told him that the pill was a dud, and that the water was just water.

  So yeah, where healing was concerned, Charlie was a big believer in the power of the mind. Except for really serious stuff, of course.

  Now that he was alone and out of danger, he let his post-combat messages flicker inside his head. It appeared as text in his mind, a stream of letters and numbers.

  In killing the owl, he’d received experience points. Normally, this would have made him level up and would have brought him boosted hit points, mana and stamina. Sometimes it would unlock new spells for him to choose. Now, that didn’t happen.

  At least his repeated use of Detect Evil had levelled it to 4. That wa
s good – with each level, his spell grew stronger. Maybe now the mind-map he got when he used it would spread wider, and maybe the evil it detected would come back not as dots, but as real shapes.

  He left the dwelling and crossed the village. Gully and Flink were sitting around a small fire, while Apollo lounged beside them and greedily stared at a pot of stew that bubbled above a fire. Charlie waved at them but then walked past, going to the east of the village where he found Larynk.