Michael Stackpole - When Dragons Rage

“Yes.”

“And?”

“And he seems normal.” Kerrigan frowned. “Normal except that I can’t detect the scars. They should be there and wrong, but his body seems to have accepted them.”

Ramoch pressed the fingers of his left hand over his mouth for a moment. “That is fascinating. Watch for more symptoms, more signs.”

“What is it? Is he okay?”

“I’m sure he’s fine. More than fine, actually. Still, it will bear watching.” Ramoch nodded. “Now, tell me, did you notice anything particular about his magick? Something that marked it as his?”

Kerrigan smiled. “I thought of that. Not at the time; we were too busy fighting. But later when I got a chance to examine the places his blood had fallen, there was something about it that had an essence of Will. It’s very hard to describe. When I cast a diagnostic spell, I would get odd echoes in the back of my mind: hearing a word as he spoke it, or catching a flash of his grin, or even seeing him as he was in Yslin, running away from me.“

That latter memory brought a frown to Kerrigan’s face. Granted that had been before Will had known him, but Will had run from a gang of youths beating him up. Had the situation been reversed, Kerrigan would have waded in to help. At least, I think I would have . Will had apologized, and had since become his friend, but some bitterness remained because of that incident. Because of it I was given the dragonbone armor to protect me .

“This is good, Kerrigan, very good. You are sensing his essence. Your mind is relating that to memories you have of him. This indicates you are capable of perceiving a great deal more information related to a spell than most other mages.”

Kerrigan smiled. “I’ve had a chance to think more on that, too, based on our previous conversations and what I noticed in Bokagul. I’ve identified at least seven different dimensions I think I should be able to find in a spell. They are: Person, School, Race, Nature, Intent, Influence, and Power Source. Person, School, and Race I know are there. I picked up on the difference between a diagnostic spell cast by Prince Murfin of the Caledo Academy and the one I would cast. Since I know it was a diagnostic, I guess I got Nature, and Intent, too. Influence I know about from you, since you said I have the taint from the DragonCrown.”

“And Power Source?”

He frowned. “I have cast spells that draw on my own physical strength. That’s how I learned to do things at Vilwan, but then there are some other spells I’ve cast in an emergency, like diagnosing and healing the urZrethi infant in the womb. I wasn’t tired afterward. It was as if the energy for that spell was taken from somewhere else. I could guess my further training at Vilwan might have showed me how to access other power sources.”

“Clearly, Kerrigan, you were shown those paths, but in a subtle manner so you do not have conscious control of those flows. Were this not true, you’d not have been able to draw from those sources.” Ramoch waved his left hand idly. “That matters not at the moment, however. Your analysis is very good, and there are dimensions you have missed, but those are largely inconsequential—temporary things dealing with local factors at the time of the casting. Your further thoughts?”

“Well, I thought about how it would be possible to remove the taint from someone or some thing. The closest analogy I can come up with is thinking of the item as a piece of cloth that has a stain on it. You have to clean the item, dye it, or put a patch over that stain. Patching would be the most crude, but could take as little as laying another enchantment over the first. Wheele—the Aurolani mage who killed my mentor—did that sort of thing to hide a spell beneath another spell. I did that with my duplicate fragment of the DragonCrown. The problem there is that, if one looks closely, the patch can be detected, and then the real stain can be seen, as you managed when sorting the dragonbone armor from the DragonCrown taint on me.“

“Your analogy will suffice, however weak. Overdyeing, then, would be a more integral form of patching. You would weave more magick through the item to draw a searcher away from the stain, making it appear to be part of some other pattern.”

Kerrigan nodded. “I guess so, yes.”

“And cleaning?”

The young mage shifted uneasily on the bed. “That I am not sure of. It would require getting into the fabric of the spell, separating out the tainted aspects, and substituting something else—which may or may not have its own taints. Just taking the time to get in to identify the taints and their parts and what they do in the spell would take a long time. Crafting replacements would take a long while as well, and then actually doing the cleansing, well… That would be very difficult.”

“But could it be done?”

Kerrigan’s shoulders rose and fell abruptly. “The trick is keeping other taints out. In a ritual setting, in an arcanorium where all was calm, where all ingredients were pure, where all outside influences were eliminated, it might be possible to minimize those things.”

“And might it be possible to fashion yet another spell, a thaumaturgical simulacrum, that would actually insert trace influences such that your weaving could have the racial taint of an elf, or the training taint of someone from Caledo?”

The young mage’s eyes opened in surprise and his head went back, banging off the headboard again. “Ouch!” He rubbed at the rising lump on his head and let the pain disguise his surprise. If someone could do that, they could hide the intent of a spell, taking a mage off-guard completely. They could lay blame for something on someone else. They could do almost anything .

“I guess that would be possible.”

“It might be necessary. The question for you is this: are your spells identifiable as being cast by a human, or do your elven spells seem elven?”

“I don’t know.” Kerrigan frowned. “Why is that important?”

Bok grunted as if that were one of the most stupid questions he’d ever heard.

“In your analysis, you’ve forgotten one very important thing. It is this: how are you going to detect all these aspects of spells?”

“With a spell.”

“Very good. Now, with the patch idea, you have a spell hiding aspects of another spell. What if the patch is reactive? What if the patch is a spell designed to send a different message back to the caster depending upon aspects of the spell being used to monitor it?“

“I’m not sure I follow.”

“Take Will, for example. You can see the scars on his throat, yet the spell you cast on him does not reveal him as changed at all. Clearly, from the scars, from the magick that accompanied his oath and the spilling of his blood, he is different.” Ramoch opened his gloved hands. “You used an elven diagnostic spell on him?”

“It’s the best one I know.”

“It’s the only one likely to be cast on him in your company, isn’t it?”

Kerrigan nodded slowly. “Human diagnostic spells work fine for assessing trouble, but the elven is better. UrZrethi would be another possibility, but unlikely.”

“So, a spell masking what was done to him that reported back null results in response to human, elven, or urZrethi spells would effectively hide what was done to him. And any other dimensions of that spell that might reveal the identity and intent of the caster.”

“Yes, exactly.” Kerrigan slowly began to smile. “And any masking spell that was used to hide a fragment of the DragonCrown might similarly be tailored to deflect spells depending on the race of the person using it, the school of magick, or the very spell itself.”

Rym Ramoch clapped his hands. “Splendid; you have it.”