Disciple of War Disciple of War (Art of the Adept #4) - Michael G. Manning Page 0,81

Selene had kept hidden for so long. Unable to form a proper response, he tried to kiss her, but she put her hand between them.

“Say it. Say you’ll come back.”

“I’ll do my best…”

“Believe it. I won’t make you promise, but tell me you believe it. You’ll be back,” she insisted.

Will hesitated, then answered, “I believe it.” She put her hand down and closed her eyes, so he sealed it with a kiss, but deep down he felt a seed of fear in his own heart. What if I can’t make it back to her?

Their journey back to Cerria was uneventful. The weeks that followed it were similar, though they were filled with a frenzy of activity as the final preparations for the campaign were made. The levies had already been brought in and were finishing their cursory training. The bulk of the troops began the march to Barrowden a week in advance of the final elements, which would include Will and some of the senior officers.

His training sessions with the student sorcerers came to an end as they joined their respective companies. There were more companies than sorcerers, so roughly a quarter of the companies had to do without, other than the captain commanding them, but Will prioritized the placements so that all the forward elements of the six-division army would be covered.

Day by day the soldiers streamed away from the city and the surrounding camps, leaving Will feeling ever emptier. Selene continued to secretly work at spellcasting, but while she had fully adjusted to the third compression, she couldn’t seem to convince her body to absorb more turyn than it needed to maintain itself. The smallest of spells left her weak and gasping, and stronger ones would incapacitate her for hours.

Strangely enough, although the war was just beginning, Will had more free time than before, so he continued his own personal training, extending the hours. His ability to reflex cast continued to expand, though once again it wasn’t the light-darts spell or the iron-body transformation, it was the silent-armor spell. It had been a useful spell to him in the past, but somehow he doubted he’d be spending a lot of time scouting now that he was the Royal Marshal.

He also expanded his repertoire, adding a simple ethereal spell that would allow him to shift his body into the ethereal plane for short periods of around five minutes or so. There were better spells that allowed longer durations, but the complexity went up significantly and he didn’t have the time to master a new eighth- or ninth-order spell. Five minutes would have to be enough, if he even had a need for it.

Naturally, he experimented with it quite a bit and soon discovered that although he wasn’t using one of the better versions that included the ability to see the material plane, he could still do so by adjusting his vision himself. The vision that provided was strange and hard to interpret, showing transparent, bluish outlines of whatever was in the other plane. Seeing from the ethereal to the material usually showed a complex array of objects, but looking from the material to the ethereal was generally fruitless. As Arrogan had said, there was simply nothing there to be seen. The only way Will was able to confirm that it actually worked in both directions was by taking objects into the ethereal and leaving them so he could try and see them after returning to the material world.

All in all, it seemed like a useful spell, especially if one needed to hide for a short period of time, or perhaps to get past an obstacle such as a wall, but it would be impossible for him to use it to move more than two or three soldiers that way—say, if he wanted to get them into a castle. There had supposedly once been ethereal-based spells that would enable one to create a temporary passage through a small portion of the ethereal plane to easily allow that type of thing, but he failed to find any, even in the restricted sections of Wurthaven’s library.

In the evenings, Will had been working on learning to control his ability to astrally project. Having someone paralyze him and seal his senses seemed like a rather extreme measure, plus as he got used to the experience, it failed to induce the panic that seemed to enable him to break free of his body. His first idea had been to find a spell that would enable