David Coe - His Father's eyes

What did a dead skinhead, a Latino political leader, and a disabled 757 have in common? Well, for one thing, they were all messing with my head.

Because my day hadn’t had enough surprises already, when I got to my office, Namid was already there. Waiting for me. That had never happened before.

From the way he greeted me you would have thought it was the most natural thing in the world, like I was getting home from work, and he was waiting for me in the kitchen, fixing dinner.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, tossing my car keys and bomber jacket on my desk.

“You need to train. We have not worked on your craft in some time.”

“It’s been two days.”

“And that is long enough.”

I no longer resisted Namid’s attempts to help me hone my craft. I still feared the powers I possessed, knowing where they would lead me. And if ever I forgot, all I needed to do was spend a few minutes with my dad. But I also understood that as my runecrafting skills improved, so would my ability to hold off the worst symptoms of the phasings, thus slowing their cumulative effect on my mind.

On an already weird day, though, his presence in my office was too weird for me to let pass.

“You’ve been waiting here so that we can train? That’s it? That’s what you want me to believe?”

“Have I ever lied to you, Ohanko?”

That brought me up short. “No,” I said without hesitation.

“Then why would you doubt me now?”

It didn’t take long for my thoughts to catch up with the conversation. “You haven’t lied to me,” I said, ignoring the second question. “But when you’re concerned about my safety, you start behaving strangely. You show up at odd times. And you avoid direct questions by asking questions of your own. So why don’t you tell me what you’re doing here?”

“First we train. Then you may ask your questions.”

It was like arguing with a kid. A seven-hundred-year-old, watery, magic-wielding kid.

He lowered himself to the floor, gazing up at me with those endlessly patient glowing eyes. I heaved a sigh and sat as well.

“Clear yourself,” he said with a low rumble, like a river in flood.

I closed my eyes and summoned an image from my youth: a golden eagle circling over the desert floor in the Superstition Wilderness, its enormous wings held perfectly still, its tail twisting as it turned. I’d been no more than nine years old when I saw it; my parents and I were on one of our many camping trips, and it was one of the happiest and most memorable moments from my childhood.

Clearing was something runecrafters did to empty their minds of distractions so that they could cast spells more efficiently and effectively. Long ago, when Namid first began to teach me the rudiments of crafting spells, he led me to this memory-there’s really no other way to put it-and told me to focus on it whenever I needed to clear myself for a spell. At first, clearing took me several minutes. Now, years later, I could do it in seconds.

I opened my eyes again, indicated to the runemyste with a curt nod that I was ready.

“Defend yourself,” he said.

We had started these sessions when I was pursuing Cahors, and ever since then, Namid had found new and excruciating ways to test my magical defenses. Today he started me off with a spell that made me feel as though he had driven a spike through my forehead. I gasped at the pain, resisting an urge to cradle my head in my hands.

Three elements: me, the pain, and a sheath of power surrounding me. I had to repeat them to myself several times-the agony clouded my thoughts. But at last it vanished, leaving me breathless, my face damp with sweat.

“Your spell was too slow,” Namid said. “In the time it took you to cast, an enemy would have killed you.”

The problem with having a teacher who was just this side of all-powerful and all-knowing was that I couldn’t argue with him.

“I know,” I said. “It hurt. It was hard to concentrate.”

“That is why you clear yourself, Ohanko. If you do so properly, you should be able to cast despite the pain.”

“You understand that I can’t walk down the street clearing myself all the time, right? Sometimes I have to do other stuff, like drive and interact with people.”

He stared at me, his face as still as ice, not allowing me the satisfaction of drawing even the hint of a smile. “Clearing is a technique for the most inexperienced of runecrafters,” he said after a weighty pause. “When you can cast at will, with the immediacy of thought, without having to pause to clear, then you will have mastered what you call magic. Right now, when it comes to runecrafting, you are little more than a child.”

That stung.

“Defend yourself.”

The assailing spell crashed down on me, its weight palpable. I felt as though I had been encased in glass. I couldn’t move. Not to cry out, or to fight free of the invisible prison he had conjured. Not even to breathe. Panic rose in me like a tide, though even as it did, I had time to think, in a distant corner of my mind, that he must have been saving this one for a time when he was really ticked at me.

I couldn’t use either of the two most common and rudimentary warding spells-reflection or deflection-nor could I rely on the sheathing spell I had cast. Those were my standbys, the spells I went to whenever possible. Namid knew this, of course. He wanted to push me away from the magic with which I was most comfortable, and for good reason. The most comfortable spells were also the easiest, and the most readily defeated by other weremystes.

My lungs were starting to burn, and my panic was about to tip over into desperation.

An idea came to me. It was ridiculous to the point of foolishness. But magic didn’t always make sense, and I had no other ideas.

I’d envisioned Namid’s attack spell as a prison of glass. So why not three elements: me, the glass, and a giant hammer?

Power surged through me as if I’d stuck my finger in an electrical outlet. My body jerked, and an instant later I could breathe again.

Namid canted his head to the side, surprise and-dare I think it?-a touch of pride on his crystal clear features. “That was well done, Ohanko. What spell did you cast?”

“What spell did you cast?”

“It was a binding, a crafting intended to paralyze you.”

I shook my head. “Then my spell shouldn’t have worked. It felt like you had encased me in glass-that was the first image that came to mind. And so I imagined a hammer shattering it, and somehow that worked.”

“And why should it not?”

“I don’t know,” I said, shrugging. “Your spell had nothing to do with glass.”

“That matters not. I have told you many times before that runecrafting is an act of will. The images or words you use do not matter.”

“I know that. But . . .”

“You know it, but you have not understood it until now. Not really.”

He was right. He was always right. But this once it didn’t bother me so much. Because even as I had told myself again and again that the words of a spell didn’t matter, I always assumed that my wardings needed to be matched in some way to the intent of the assailing spells they were meant to block. I was starting to understand that they didn’t. They needed to match my perception of those attacks, which was totally different, and much easier.

I said as much to Namid, and he nodded, the smile lingering. “It has taken longer than I would have liked, but you are learning. Defend yourself.”

He threw attack after attack at me, some of them torturous, others merely terrifying. But the last one was the worst. He managed to mess with my mind so that with no warning I found myself in the middle of what felt like a phasing. Disorientation, paranoia, delusion. All I could think was that it was too early, that the sun couldn’t possibly be down yet. And so with the last shred of rational thought I could muster, I grasped at three elements: me, the phasing, and sunlight.