A Class On Magical Theory
For the first time in his several lives, Taylor escaped a world he didn't want to be in, on purpose. Re-entry into Tenobre was smooth, just a slight disorientation from being yanked back across the cosmos, however many lightyears from Tenobre to Thrace and back again. He landed, with minimal disorientation, inside a magic circle made of carved Darkmaw shell. The device was composed of three concentric circles, each with its own set of maths, powered by twenty spirit stones. There were only two square meters of space for payload inside the circle, but that was plenty to send a single person. Taylor and Gonzo had experimented with summoning all kinds of things other than a human, but that didn't guarantee it would work across the vast distances between worlds.
Taylor had given low odds that it would work until he felt the magic start to wrap around him. Then he knew he'd be fine. Probably.
There was wild cheering from nearby, where the train was stopped by the side of Zorda's highway. Two disciples and a dozen bulwark mobbed him as soon as he left the circle, with Milo in the lead. The young man grabbed him in a bear hug and lifted him off the ground while the Tabuas hugged both of them, and everyone else glommed onto the scrum of happy, amazed, cheering people. For some reason, there was a lot of bouncing up and down to go with the cheering, but Taylor didn't mind. He was feeling pretty jubilant himself.
Defense in depth. That was the key. He could stop a summons in progress if he had some warning, and he had a way to return if a summons was successful. He had also anchored his soul to Tenobre with Sandim's Return, the cryptic prayer that let a disciple return from death. He wasn't sure if that last part helped much or not, but it couldn't hurt. Now all he needed was a way to hide himself from the divinations that kept finding him, and he could call his defenses adequate. For the first time in nearly a century, he could lead a stable life. What would that be like?
"Someone get the medal," he called, and the round disk of metal was plucked from the circle and sent into the scrum, passing hand to hand until it reached Taylor. His followers were not letting him go just yet. He pulled its other half from where it hung around his neck and compared the two disks: they still exhibited a slight pull toward each other, like a pair of magnets. An obscenely long number spiraled out from the center toward the edge: one hundred and one random digits.
"So are you going to explain any of this, or what?" asked Brother Darius.
"If you let me breathe!" The small crowd laughed but gave him some room. They even sat on the desert floor like attentive students, expectant eyes turned up to him. They had just seen him get sucked away to another world and then reappear a few minutes later. The bulwarks were curious, but Darius and Hypha, the two disciples in the group, were interested. This had a bearing on them as practitioners.
"So you've all gathered by now that Inscription Arts is a thing, and Nexus has been using it to make useful artifacts. Crossbows, spirit stones, links, those useful goggles most of you have strapped to your heads right now: they're all made through the Inscription Arts in one way or another. The inscription language includes symbols for manipulating space. Attaching one space to another and swapping their contents is not actually that hard when the distance and direction between them are known. The problem is targeting, and that problem gets exponentially more difficult when you realize that our world is moving through space, and you want to target an object in another world that is also moving through space, but you don't know where in the universe that thing is, what direction it's moving in, or how fast it's moving. Oh, and planets don't move through space in a straight line. They spin, while orbiting around their respective suns, which themselves are hurtling through space, and not in a straight line.
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"The brute force solution is divination: lots and lots of high-powered divination. But, as some of you may remember from my more formal lectures, divination is my absolute worst subject. So, we turn to the central laws of thaumaturgy. Like attracts like. Parts of a whole retain a connection after they are separated, no matter how vast the distances between them. That's why the Prayer of Finding works best when you have a piece of your target. The hair of a lost child will lead you to the rest of him."
He held up the two medals for everyone to see. "This is not two medallions. This is one medallion, with its substance divided into two equal and identical halves." He aligned the disks of metal and let them touch, then pressed them gently together as they merged into a single disk. Aside from being larger and heavier, it was identical to the two he started with. He held up the larger medallion for his class to see. "The two halves are perfectly entangled with each other, so much so that if you scratched one the other would also be scratched. Further, this is designed to be unique in all the universe. It has a long sequence of numbers engraved on the face. The alloy uses randomized proportions of metals. For some reason," he flipped the coin around, "the reverse has my face on it. So we know who it belongs to, I guess? And the edges are inscribed to enable pulling it apart. It just … requires … some effort … "
He pulled the medal apart again, which required more force than pushing it back together and a considerable amount of spirit. But it separated like it was supposed to, and soon he had two smaller identical medallions in his hands.
"For my keeper," he said casually, flipping one of them to Milo, who caught it with pride and tucked it into a tightly buttoned pocket in a money belt he kept beneath his brigandine.
"Don't lose that!" ribbed one of the bulwarks.
"It's got the Hierarch's face on it!" said another. More jokes were shot in Milo's direction.
"All right!" shouted Taylor when the jokes started to get stale, "let's break down the circle and get moving. We're on a schedule here. The Shadow Council isn't going to kill itself!"
The most clever part of the circle, in Taylor's opinion, was the way it broke down into segments. Lilian devised a latching system that clicked together easily but held the segments firmly enough to withstand a major working. The edges were labeled: A clicked into A, B clicked into B, and so on. To take the circle apart, one needed a special tool or a lot of patience. All the pieces fit inside a rectangular box seventy centimeters long. The lid was engraved with a template for a new breakdown tool, in case the original was lost. It was ridiculous that Taylor had to travel with two sets of countermeasures against summonings, but at least they were easy to pack.
When this was over and Nexus publicized the new art, Taylor would have to start paying his artificers serious money. He'd bought their loyalty so far with meaningful work, grand opportunities, and a steady supply of materials. But now, he couldn't afford to lose them.