Page 30 of The Sundered Realms

“What was that?”

“Later.”

The tension in his voice persuaded her to drop the matter—for now.

Because whatever they were looking for, he’d found it.

It took a few more minutes of hiking through the trees before Liris recognized the signs: the gradual graying. She shivered.

Another demon lay ahead of them.

Except when they stopped a minute later... there was no demon?

Vhannor kicked a pile of fallen leaves with his boot to reveal the radiating black spellcraft lines, and the circle itself was... small. The trees around were obviously dying, but nowhere near the degree of decay in the swamp.

“Has a demon escaped?” Liris asked doubtfully.

“No,” Vhannor said, snapping back once more to what Liris was coming to think of as his default no-feelings-only-all-hyper-competent-business-all-the-time mode. “You can see the difference, can’t you?”

Obviously. She nodded without rolling her eyes.

“This portal hasn’t been active long enough for a demon to have come through,” he said. “The ambient magic in the realms is painful to them—what the portals really do is drain magic into the void, and once enough is cleared away, it becomes safe for the demons to enter. A portal this small would take months to drain enough to be a problem.”

“Oh, is that how demon hunting teams keep up? When a drop in ambient magic registers, you investigate first to determine how fast it needs to be dealt with.”

“Exactly. We never catch up, but we prioritize. A portal going from zero to demon-ready in less than a month never happens—the reason I was here is because two portals pinged close together in Etorsiye where I wouldn’t have expected one.”

“Jadrhun,” Liris began, then shook her head. “Wait, no. I’m confused.”

Vhannor nodded sharply. “Come look at the spell.”

Liris approached, trying to match Vhannor’s calm confidence, reminding herself she couldn’t get caught in the spell without trying. Even if she felt a becoming-distressingly-familiar cold, this wasn’t even close to being like the demon swamp.

Except it was still a spell to open a demon portal.

She frowned down at it. “Five patterns. I recognize the geometry, the embroidery directions, the Talpathian dirge notation, the—“ She tilted her head, walking around the circle. “I think I’ve seen these marks on maps—near bodies of water.”

Vhannor glanced at her sidelong. Was he impressed or disappointed? “They’re an archaic way of recording wind and tide movements. And the language?”

She shook her head, heart sinking. Maybe her knowledge wasn’t as encompassing as she’d thought. “Nothing I’ve seen before.”

“Unsurprising, since it’s invented.”

Okay, so that... wasn’t a failing grade then, right?

Vhannor passed her a pad of paper. “Copy the spell out while I work on the dispelling preparations—this is small enough that I can handle it without a team, but we’ll need a record for the report.”

Maybe not. Liris narrowed her eyes. “Is this a trap? Should you be trusting me to copy demon portals? Just because I don’t know what it means doesn’t mean I can’t write it.”

Vhannor raised his eyebrows. “And then I’d have a pretty good guess who was responsible and where to find her.”

At the university.

Where he could keep her in jail if he wanted, because he was the Lord of Embhullor and they had a voiding autocracy even if there was technically a council and he could make whatever exceptions he wanted.

After a moment Vhannor swore under his breath. “You don’t have to. I meant that to demonstrate trust, not—“

Liris accepted the paper.

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