Free The Golden Key (Book 3) by Robert P. Hansen

should
not have worked at all, but the spell had worked—just not the way it had
always worked before. Would other spells do the same thing?
    Simple knots are the most powerful ones , Voltari had
told him so long ago. They have a versatility that cannot be overestimated.
All other knots are derivative combinations of the simple ones.
    All other knots are derivative? Angus frowned and
turned the idea over in his head. If the Lamplight knot—one of the most basic
ones for flame—could work with other forms of magic, why hadn’t Voltari told
him about it? Surely Voltari had known that it would.
    He turned to the Lamplight glowing in his palm and studied
it. It wasn’t warm to the touch at all; instead, it was moist and cool, as if
it were a tiny, incandescent globe of water, and the light it shed was much
dimmer than normal. The range of the light it provided was only about two dozen
feet before it bled into the darkness.
    Magic is simple , Voltari had told him. Spells are
complex.
    Angus shrugged; there was no point worrying about it now. He
had enough blue-tinted light to see by, and that would hasten his progress. He
attached it above his left shoulder, just behind his ear where the glare would
be mostly hidden. Should he try to cast another spell? Flying would be optimal,
but would Typhus keep the magic in focus long enough for him to cast it? And if
Typhus quit looking at the magic, would Angus lose his grip on the spell? Perhaps
if he skimmed atop the surface of the glacier?
    Angus took a deep breath and brought the magic around him
into sharper focus. He studied the shades of gray, of white, of black. He was high
in the mountains. There should be plenty of blue, white, and brown. It wasn’t a
volcano, so there wouldn’t be very many red strands, and they would be weak.
That was the mistake he had made with the first spell; he had chosen one of the
abundant gray shades. Had it been a water-based thread or a sky-based thread
heavy with water? With all the snow around, it could have been either.
    As he sorted through the strands, trying to group them into
ever-tightening categories with a narrow range of shading, he considered what it
was he was about to do. It was reckless in the extreme, and it might not work
at all. Worse, it could backfire. Still, he had cast the Flying spell so many
times over the winter that it was possible his body knew it well enough
that it didn’t need priming, and he had primed for it before his
encounter with Sardach. He hadn’t been able to cast it during that battle, and
it should still be primed. He didn’t know for sure, since he couldn’t see the
magic within him, but if it were still there and if his hands remembered the
movements, he might succeed in casting it, just as he had the Lamplight
spell. If he did, he would be able to make it across to the other mountain in
minutes instead of avoiding the valley and creeping along the face of the
mountain at a snail’s pace. He sighed and looked down at his useless right
hand, still firmly tucked into the belt of his robe. It would be risky to cast
the Flying spell with one hand, but at least Voltari had prepared him for it. It
had been a harsh lesson, one with far too many lashes from Voltari’s Firewhip,
but he had eventually cast Lamplight by using just his left hand. But Flying
was a much more complicated series of knots.
    He licked his lips and looked at the magic around him again.
He thought he had narrowed down the grouping of sky-based magic, but he wasn’t
sure. It was one of two prominent groups, both of which were a
light-to-middling color of gray. One would have to be sky, and the other should
be earth; there were simply too many strands for them to be anything
else—except, perhaps, the ice-based magic tied to the snow, but that should be a
whitish color—or a very pale gray—and the chill white strands looked the
same as they always did. The darker gray should be earth; brown was darker than
the blues in the sky. He