Abaddon's Call

Chapter Thirty-Three

Lord Lugh bought Graydon's chip cryptically. Something Graydon was learning was the way of things when it came to the lords.

The scaled folio commanded the execution of Nillon Salord for the crime of knowing too much and being a little bitch. The last bit was added to any execution order via acronym. Mages believed it was a word in their mother tongue that allowed the executioner to be creative.

Few needed the urging. Normally, the mage receiving a balb execution was well known. They put one on Jasor once, and even mages tried to cash in, yet no one could manage it. They changed the wording on Jasor's folio to by any means necessary, a phrase which really described the whole issue with Jasor.

Once he was permanently banded, the execution writ was dropped because Jaso was no longer a threat but had been taught Salord secrets that needed to be maintained to keep order.

After reading the folio and cursing, Graydon had awkwardly said to Naena, "How would you feel about just straight out killing Nillon?"

"Is that not the goal?" she had asked.

"I don't mean twenty years from now. I mean in, like, forty-eight days or so."

She had laughed at him, said good night, and closed the curtains on her bed. He had taken that as his answer, tucked the folio away, and gone to bed.

Three hours later, she woke him with a glow in his hand.

"I have an idea," she said.

Graydon saw the look in her eyes and knew it for what it was: the manic ramblings of a mage with furious purpose. If ever there was something he'd want to encourage in his shield, that was it.

Graydon had pulled himself upward despite wanting to sleep after his long day.

He gave in to her every whim and just sat back, watching it happen. He had to dip into his accounts to pay for a few things, but to see her at work was amazing. She received word back from the bankers at the same time. Those books sat abandoned to the side while she threw together a protection spell to keep all Hell called into the spell from getting out again.

She somehow got her hands on a very old, very obscure spell that Graydon had to report to his father.

That part was a little embarrassing.

Once Naena knew the spell, there was no stopping her, and it could be put to use for his family. The obscure spell got around most teleportation magic, wards, and difficulties even, by laying two pieces of land over one another simultaneously.

The spell got around teleportation wards because it wasn't technically teleportation. It had been built using the archives as a reference point.

Naena abandoned that spell when she realized she couldn't use it to slip one of the pieces into Hell, but Graydon would draw her back to it later. The best practice for the spell was for a mage to learn to draw one place to themselves.

Like their workroom or a weapon's room, allowing her to retrieve items. With a little work, she could use it to step from one place to another, never alerting the teleporters because she wasn't using teleportation magic.

Instead of using that spell, she slapped a together spell to create a doorway in the middle and instructed it to open into Hell. The doorway was the sort that could not be used to travel from place to place because it had no physical boundaries, which were required to allow physical bodies to travel through while remaining alive.

That wouldn't have worked for one of the boys, Graydon knew, but he said nothing to his father because he had a nagging suspicion that Lord Pan was unaware of the writ. He also didn't inform Naena of that issue aside to ensure she never used it to move them. The doorway would kill Nillon even as she attempted to send him into Hell, but she didn't need to know that.