Revelation (Seeds of Humanity: The Cobalt Heresy) by Caleb Wachter Page A

creatures,” Pi’Vari explained.
    Aemir nodded enthusiastically, “What is this landmark, then?” he asked as he moved to the bed he had stowed his gear under.
    Pi’Vari hesitated and looked at me. I allowed a grin to play out on my face before turning to Aemir, “Let’s just say you’ll need some warmer clothes.”

Chapter VI: On the Road Again
     
     
    The great, dome-shaped peak of the northernmost mountain depicted in the drawings loomed before us after nearly two weeks of travel on foot. The weather had turned wet almost as soon as we had set out, and two weeks of walking in the mud and rain had proven enough to test our patience.
    The mountain was large enough that it wore what I supposed was a permanent crown of ice which extended about a third of the way down from the top. It was the mountain’s distinctive shape that made it the obvious destination, as neither Pi’Vari, nor anyone else in Coldetz knew of a similar mountain.
    “I thought wizards could fly,” grumbled Aemir as he brought up the rear. He was much more heavily bundled in layers of clothing than I had ever seen him in our travels together, but he still shivered and fidgeted with his hands to keep them warm.
    Dancer grunted his agreement from his position in the lead. Dancer had taken a grey bearskin cloak from Coldetz, and he looked surprisingly fierce with the head of the bear worn over his own like something out of a cartoon. The cold really didn’t seem to bother the little man all that much, in any event.
    Pi’Vari tisked from beside me. “Only wizards with the proper licenses can use regulated magics like flight for travel,” he chided for what had to have been at least the tenth time in recent days. “Otherwise, the sky would be filled with wizards flitting about this way and that, which would be a very unseemly—not to mention dangerous—situation.” Pi’Vari’s clothing hadn’t changed since Coldetz, due to his incredible tolerance for different climates.
    Pi’Vari had the currently envious luxury of bearing a blood connection to a mystical creature of some kind. He had always been reluctant to divulge details on this aspect of his heritage, but I had learned that such connections were often part of larger bargains struck between people and the powers that lie beyond our world. The most likely scenario was that his great grandfather or grandmother made a pact with a supernatural creature of some sort, and their blood would bear the mark to some degree for all time. A fringe benefit of this mingling was an incredibly high tolerance to heat, cold, and apparently even low levels of oxygen.
    “We didn’t have time to apply for any licenses before we left Veldyrian,” I reminded them. “Besides, the price would have been absurd.”
    I heard Aemir shaking his head from the rustling his head wrapping made. “Your Empire is a very, very strange place,” he said bitterly.
    Again, Dancer grunted his agreement.
    “You’ll get no argument from me,” I remarked casually as I skirted a particularly nasty mud hole. The absurdity of the bureaucratic mess in Veldyrian was truly unbelievable, and this is coming from someone who once studied to be a tax accountant in the USA before deciding it wasn’t my cup of tea.
    Special magics like flight weren’t the only things which were regulated in the Empire. In order to legally cast a spell of almost any kind, you had two options: the first was to research the spell entirely on your own and thenapply for an Imperial patent. The patent approval process was actually fairly quick to resolve, but in the event that your own version of a given spell too closely resembled one which was already registered, your application was denied and you could even be sued for what effectively amounted to copyright infringement.
    If the spell you wanted was beyond your own ability to create independently, or if it was one you simply didn’t want to spend months or years researching, then you had to use the