Chapter 1-26: Traveling Legs (2/2)

“True. From a magical standpoint, it helps spread the knowledge of these spells wider and farther by having someone who can make the books available. Sylune would hardly be displeased, unless the maker starts selling to the morally deficient.”

“I have the feeling that if I were to make inquiries, I would find he is making regular copies of this to the adherents of Uruth!” he managed to laugh.

“The Lord of Wizards would certainly make use of lesser hands to do the dirty work,” I acknowledged, and he slowly nodded. Any form of manual labor that could be pawned off was generally done so by the elitist and intellectual snobs of the God of Magic, who pretended to be above philosophical differences on the use of magic and claimed their god was only concerned about magic itself.

Since magic was hugely affected by the Alignments, that would be utter stupidity, but the dumb bought it, and brought a lot of money the Uruthar’s way for dubious Casting, which was pretty much the point. Wagemages and sellspells were common ways to describe them, with goldstaves being a bit more insulting.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Church of Trose was very happy to take advantage of the proclivities of the wizards of Uruth...

-----

A minor spell to create a zephyr, another to quench an area in water... there were four specialized Cantrips, basically devoted applications of Prestidigitation or other Cantrips worked out by some smart fellow.

I Wrote them into my Ring, and started on the next few books.

As I had expected, the foundation of all these Wizardry spells were sorcerous Bloodline spells, written down, copied out, and redressed to their fundamentals. There were only three other spells in written form that did not come from Bloodlines or were adaptations of Divine or Natural magic, as the style of the writing deviated wildly from the others.

All were devoted variants of Detect I, where the range and duration were increased slightly by devoting the full spell to the target from memorization, instead of at the moment of Casting.

I came upon the page for Shards, and just lifted an eye at its simplicity. There were no Bloodlines that had Shards, and it wasn’t a divine spell, purest arcane magic at its finest.

It didn’t have the alternative Casting choices worked into it... it was one Shard, plus one for every two levels past One, up to five. That was it.

Huh. No wonder mine looked so impressive.

Even with information sharing and a lot of people, breaking new ground on spells was a thing that took time. The Power of Ten had baked in the Archmage’s knowledge of magic, which ostensibly came from a society that had used and refined spells for thousands, or tens of thousands, of years. A few decades wasn’t enough time to make a significant impact on a pool of knowledge that literally took geniuses to improve on.

The DC’s to make new spells from scratch were quite something, after all...

“Do you have the ink and archival paper for making a spell page?” I inquired calmly.

Initiate Hugo was watching patiently from the side, half dozing, as my quiet perusal of the pages was hardly eventful. My question snapped open his eyes.

“We keep a few pages of Scroll-worthy paper and basic spellbooks around,” he admitted warily. “Why would you need them?”

I pointed at the Shards spell. “You’ve only got a third of this spell here.”

He blinked, and looked at it. “Shards? Are you serious?”

“Yes.” I continued carefully cycling the pages over, I was in a section devoted to combat magic. “Ah, Energy Grasp, the same. You only have the lightning variant here, and without the full-round casting variant.... Only the Ice version of the Elemental Orb I, too...”

I watched his face working out of the corner of my eye. “You... have a better version of these? Without raising Valence?” he had to ask.

I nodded slowly. “I imagine such improved battle magic would be worth a considerable amount of money?” I had to ask.

“An improved basic battle spell that even an apprentice could use?” His eyes were dancing. “That could be worth an immense amount of money, Miss Traveler!”

I nodded as I continued flipping pages. “I am not greedy, but I am not going to ignore the amount of money I can earn from doing this, either, as that money will simply go to others.” He grimaced and nodded, despite himself.

“I am not yet skilled enough to create Bloodbonded ink, but I will do so in the future. I will see to it that the Ivory Scepters of Harse are charged only a nominal fee for this, as I will with the other church-affiliated orders of the gods of Good. I can instead make the master spell available to the Orders, for a more significant fee, and a share of the income generated off them.”

“At that time, I will be happy to put you in contact with my superiors,” he agreed seriously.

“I will ask around for how much to overcharge goldstaves for,” I winked at him, and he smiled despite himself. Naturally the elitists would crawl all over the idea of an improved low Valence battle magic spell. I would be able to make money until I didn’t feel like it, send master copies to the Churches, and collect fees from them once they took over the copying business.

Less reliance on this girl’s background. I sighed. I really was going to have to go to that home address, wasn’t I?

Plans always in motion... maybe after tonight, and I got my new Staff started...