Rick Cook - Wizard’s Bane

"So, how do you work magic?"

"First you must know what you are doing," Moira said. "Then you must perform the appropriate actions with the proper phrases. If you do it correctly and if you make no mistakes, then you make magic work for you."

Wiz gestured with the stick he had used to poke up the fire. "You mean if I wave a magic wand and say—uh—’bippity bobbity boo’ then… ?"

A lance of flame shot from the smouldering end of the stick into the heart of the campfire. The blaze exploded in a ball of incandescent white and an evil orange column soared above the tops of the trees. Wiz gasped for breath in the suffocating blast of heat. Through the haze and blinding glare he saw Moira, on her feet and gesturing frantically.

Suddenly it was quiet. The fire was a friendly little campfire again and the cool night air flowed into Wiz’s lungs and soothed his scorched face. Moira stood across the fire from him, her hair singed, her cloak smouldering and her eyes blazing.

"Yes." She snapped. "That’s exactly what I mean."

"I’m sorry," Wiz stammered. "I didn’t mean to…" Then his jaw dropped. "Hey, wait a minute. That was magic!"

"That was stupid," the hedge witch countered, beating out an ember on her cloak.

"No, I mean I worked magic," Wiz said eagerly. "That means I am a magician. Bal-Simba was wrong." He grinned and shook his head. "Son of a gun."

"What you are is an idiot," Moira snapped. "Any fool can work magic, and far too many fools do."

"But…"

"Didn’t you listen to anything I just told you? Magic is all around us. It is easy to make. Any child can do it. If you are careless you can make it by accident as you just did."

"Well, if it’s so easy to make…"

"Sparrow, easy to make and useful are not the same thing. To be useful magic must be controlled. Could you have stopped what you just created just now? Of course not! If I had not been here you would have burned the forest down. A careless word, a thoughtless gesture and you loose magic on the world."

She stopped and looked around the clearing for signs of live coals. "And mark well, magic is not easy to learn. There are a hundred ways, perhaps a thousand of doing what you just did. And most of them are useless because they cannot be controlled. Without control magic is not just useless, it is hideously dangerous."

"But I still made magic," Wiz protested.

Moira snorted. "You made it once. By accident. What makes you think you could do it again?"

"What makes you think I couldn’t?" Wiz countered, picking up the stick. "All I have to do is point at the fire and say…"

"Don’t, " Moira yelled. "Don’t even think of trying it again."

Wiz lowered the stick and looked at her.

"Sparrow, heed me and heed me well. The chance that you could do that again is almost nil. The essence of success in magic is to repeat absolutely everything with not the tiniest variation every single time you recite a spell."

She gestured at him. "Look at you. You have shifted your stance, you are holding the stick at a different angle, you are facing southeast instead of North, you are… oh, different in a dozen ways. Could you say those words with exactly the same inflection? Could you give your wrist exactly the twist you used in the gesture? Could you clench your left hand in exactly the same way?"

"Is all that important?"

"All that is vital ," Moira told him. "All that and much more. The phase of the moon, the angle of the sun. The hour of the day or night. All enter into magic and all must be considered.

"No matter what you have been told, magical talent does not consist of some special affinity for magic, some supernatural gift. Magical ability is the ability to control what you produce. And that turns on noticing the tiniest detail of what is done and being able to repeat it flawlessly."

That makes a weird kind of sense, Wiz admitted to himself. Like programming. There’s no redundancy in the language and the tiniest mistake can have major consequences. Look at all the time I’ve spent going over code trying to find the missing semicolon at the end of a statement, or a couple of transposed letters. It also meant he probably was a magical klutz. He was the kind of guy who walked into doors and spent five minutes hunting for his car every time he went to the mall.

"Wait a minute, though," Wiz said. "If all it takes is a good memory, why can’t most people learn to do magic?"

Moira flicked a strand of coppery hair away from her face with an exasperated gesture. "A good memory is the least part of what we call the talent."

"Sure, but with practice…"

"Practice!" Moira snorted. "Perform a spell incorrectly and you may not get the opportunity to do it again.

"Look you, when those without the talent attempt a spell, one of three things will happen. The first, and far away the most likely outcome is that nothing at all will happen. What comes out is so far removed from the true spell that is it completely void. That is the most favorable result because it does no harm and it discourages the practitioner.

"The second thing that can happen is that the spell goes awry, usually disastrously so." She smiled grimly. "Every village has its trove of stories of fools who sought to make magic and paid for their presumption. Some villages exist no longer because of such fools.

"The third thing is that the spell is successful. That happens perhaps one out of every thousand attempts." She frowned. "In some ways that is the worst. It encourages the fool to try again, often on a grander scale."

"So what you’re saying is that its easy to make magic by accident but hard to do on purpose."

"Say rather virtually impossible to do on purpose." Moira corrected. "Without the talent and proper training you cannot do it.

"But there is another level of complication beyond even that," Moira went on. "A magician must not only be able to recite spells successfully, he or she must thoroughly understand their effects and consequences." She settled by the fire and spread her cloak. "Do you know the tale of the Freshened Sea?"

Wiz shook his head.

"Then listen and learn.

"Long ago on a small island near the rim of the Southern Sea (for it was then so called) there lived a farmer named Einrich. His farm was small, but the soil was good and just over the horizon was the Eastern Shore where the people would pay good money for the fruits his island orchards produced. All he lacked was fresh water for his trees, for the rains are irregular there and he had but one tiny spring.

"Some years the rains were scant and so were his crops of apples and pears. Some years they came not at all and Einrich spent day after weary day carrying buckets of water so his trees would not perish.

"All around him was water, but he had not enough fresh to feed his groves. Daily he looked at the expanse of sea stretching away to the horizon on all sides and daily he cursed the lack.

"Now this Einrich, ill-fortune to him!, had some talent for magic. He dabbled in it, you see, and somehow he survived his dabblings. That gave him knowledge and a foolish pride in his own abilities.

"So Einrich conceived a plan to give him more water. He concocted and cast a spell to turn the water around his island fresh.

"He constructed a demon, bound it straitly, and ordered him to make fresh the water around his island."

"Wait a minute," Wiz said. "What do you mean he ’constructed’ a demon?"

"Demons are the manifestations of spells, not natural creatures as the ignorant believe," Moira said. "They are the products of human or non-human magicians, although they may live long beyond their creators.

"To continue: In doing this, Einrich was foolhardy beyond belief. Great spells work against great forces and if they are not done properly the forces lash back. Einrich was not so fortunate as to die from the effects of his bungling. His house was blasted to ruin and a huge black burn still marks the spot on the island, but he survived and the water around his island turned to fresh.