They stepped forward and Jayna sent out a spell that formed a glowing light in front of her to guide their way, but they were soon met by a blast of wind. Jayna braced herself, creating a barrier with the magic ball spell in front of them, shielding them from the wind.
It gusted for what seemed an hour, and when it finally faded, she pushed outward with the ball of flame and stepped into the room.
“You can stop using your enchantments on us,” she said to Raollet.
He stood behind the desk, a table full of items arranged on it, and held a wand-like object upright, as if to attack again. “Jayna Aguelon?” He glanced over to Eva then back to Jayna. “How are you capable of doing that?”
“Let’s just say I have a little experience in this kind of room,” Jayna replied.
“You should not be able to defend against this. This is an outpost.”
“Exactly.” She looked around. The room was unharmed.
“I take it you came down here when your shop was destroyed?”
He nodded. “The shop. Everything within it. The sorcerers came here, thinking they would destroy all the dular enchantments in the city.”
“Not destroy them. Activate them.”
“They don’t need to trigger them,” he said. “They have some way of mitigating the enchantments’ power.”
Jayna frowned. That fit. When she had been placed in the cell, Agnew had some way of neutralizing her enchantments, but not all of them—at least, he hadn’t managed to neutralize Topher’s enchantment, for whatever reason.
“I’m sorry about your shop.”
“It’s not your fault. This time.”
“I’m not entirely sure about that.”
She didn’t know what was her fault, what was the fault of the Ashara, or what was the fault of the Sorcerers’ Society. But she knew she needed to get more answers.
“I need to understand the Ashara.”
“That’s why you came here?”
“I came here for answers. You’re the only one who knows about them.”
“I’ve told you. All I know are stories. Nothing more than that. Anything known about the Ashara, truly known, has been lost.”
Jayna sighed. She hated the pressure in the room, hated the way it made her feel, the way it seemed to constrict around her, fighting against her use of magic. All she wanted was to end that, to find some way of overpowering it.
She pushed out a hint of smoke and it trailed out along the walls, muting the enchantments in the area. Then she took a deep breath, slightly more relaxed. Before muting them, she had felt an ongoing unease.
“What did you do?”
She looked over to Raollet. “Why does it matter?”
“You shouldn’t have been able to . . .” He tipped his head to the side, and for the first time, he seemed to see her ring. “Bloodstone. That’s what you have, isn’t it?”
Jayna grasped her hand around the ring and looked to Raollet. “What does it matter?”
“You shouldn’t be using power like that. It’s dangerous.”
“I’m well aware of how dangerous it is. I’ve seen it.”
He frowned. “Have you?” He glanced down at the book before looking up at her. “There were rumors of bloodstone in the city recently.”
“More than rumors,” she said. “I helped prevent the bloodstone from blasting through the dular houses—at least, as many as I could.”
“You were the one who did that?”
“I had no choice. If I hadn’t, the houses would have been destroyed, and the dular would have been killed, and . . .”
The very thing she was trying to prevent—this battle—would have likely already happened by now, despite her intentions to stop it.
The dular had ultimately blamed the Society for the fires, although the Society helped put out the flames in the dular homes. And now the Sorcerers’ Society was attacking the dular because they believed the dular were responsible for an attack on the Society. War had broken out in the city. Despite every effort she made to stop it, war seemed to happen anyway.
“I just need to know about the Ashara,” she said to him. “Something is taking place, and I’ve been trying to prevent it, but regardless of what I’ve done, darkness keeps coming.”
He looked down at the book before looking back at her. “I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to help you.”
“Because you’re afraid?”
“Because I don’t know.” He eyed Eva and frowned, studying her as if just noticing her, before turning his attention back to Jayna. “Nelar has been a place of power for a long time, though none of us have known why.”
“None of you?”
“Those of us who study these things. We have not understood why Nelar would be so important. There has been power in Nelar for as long as Nelar has been a city. Even before it was part of the El’aras, it was something else.” He shook his head. “We don’t know, but there are remnants of it even now. You can look around the city, you can see that the city itself has changed, and you can see evidence that some of these buildings existed from a time before even the El’aras.”
“Like this one?” Jayna asked, looking around.
“This is dular,” he said.
“The enchantments within it are dular, but the building itself, and the stone, and everything here . . .” Jayna shook her head. “I don’t think this is dular.”
“Perhaps not,” he said. He folded up the book and stuffed it under his arm. “Unfortunately, I don’t have any answers for you. I’ve been looking into the Ashara since you left. I wanted to understand why these enchantments have been used, and I can’t find anything. Only more stories. The Ashara. The El’aras. An ancient disagreement. And then it stopped.”
“Why?” Jayna asked.
“I don’t know. It just . . . stopped.”
“Well, I’ve seen at least one Ashara recently, maybe more than that.”
“No. There would not be more than one. They would not travel together. If you have seen an Ashara,” he said—and there was a hint to his tone that suggested he still didn’t believe her—“then you have seen just a single one.”
Jayna started to smile. “A single Ashara? I’ve seen more than that.” She saw Asaran, but then she had seen at least one other, unless the man who’d attacked her in the street hadn’t actually been Ashara and had only used enchantments. There was no doubt in her mind that there was more than one Ashara here. At least two. Maybe even more. And then there was somebody else who had used enchantments to make it appear as if the Ashara were here.
“The stories do say that the Ashara can change forms,” Raollet said.
“Yes, they can take on human form.”
“They are creatures that take on human form when they want. Not that they are humans.”
“And?”
“And because they can take on that form, they can be anyone they want.”
“So you’re saying that even though I think I’ve seen multiple Ashara, what I’ve really seen is—”
“A single Ashara.” He leaned forward, gripping the book against his chest. “If that’s what this even is. Or perhaps it’s only enchantments.”