Michael Stackpole - Of Limited Loyalty

Though that thought disturbed Vlad the most-primarily for its implication for his children-he set it aside for the consideration of a greater issue. He went back to Fire’s texts. Fire had used his observations of the natural world as confirmation of patterns in Scripture. Prince Vlad reversed that. He found a formulation that most closely approximated the words used to teach him to shoot a musket. He copied out the lines and included the numbers. The jumble of verses read, “The sun stood still and lit the way, shadows growing small.”

He compared the words and data to plants, animals, and anything else he could think to use. Correlation escaped him at first, then he closed his eyes and composed a mental picture of what the words suggested. The sun was standing still, so he visualized it at its zenith. That would naturally make shadows small, but not completely invisible. Depending upon how far north one was from the equator, the angle of the shadow to the base of a rod would vary. It struck Vlad that while the image mirrored the noonday sun, it did so without invoking the sun directly. He suspected it did so because the image created would trigger magick sufficient for lighting brimstone and because, somewhere lost in the annals of time, a sorcerer invoking the power unleashed by the sun’s direct image had accessed incredible power or caused a disaster, or perhaps both.

So the image we are trained to focus upon limits us. Prince Vlad frowned. The reason a musket spat fire when shot was because not all of the brimstone used in the charge was consumed before the ball left the muzzle. More powerful magicks might consume the brimstone completely, creating more pressure. That might burst a gun barrel, but were the breech strong enough, the greater propulsion would make a bullet go further and faster.

The reverse engineering of the spell cracked the door on an area of study that was at the root of all magick. The Tharyngians, when they overthrew the King and Church during their revolution, had begun to use scientific methods of measurement and observation to study and quantify the basic principles of magick. Had they had Fire’s notes, they might well have understood everything and be so far beyond any other nation in the ability to control magick that they would be unstoppable. There was no doubt that the infinite power granted through magick could so thoroughly corrupt one that he might attempt to take over the world-and make him believe he might be successful in that attempt.

The Tharyngians’ study had uncovered several things. Guy du Malphias had been able to reanimate the dead. Owen’s reportage about what Prince Vlad took to be a control center suggested the Laureate could control his pasmortes at range. Owen had also seen du Malphias move objects with magick. This meant that either the dictum that magick only worked by touch was wrong or that du Malphias had managed to redefine touch. The idea that magicians were taught that magick only worked at touch certainly limited their ability to use it, but exactly how one could redefine touch escaped the Prince.

And then he heard Mugwump give his usual trumpeted bellow to welcome the wurmwright and dinner. In his laboratory, the sound came muted because it had to travel through the wall. Outside it would be crisp and clear and in the wurmrest it would be deafening. Then he remembered the times he’d ridden Mugwump while the dragon dove for fish in the river, and how the bellow had sounded different in water. Then it struck him.

Magick did only work by touch. The key was in defining the medium through which it moved. Just as water and the wall changed the nature of the sound so, too, might magick be changed by communication through another medium. Depending upon range and air pressure one might have to adjust a spell, just as one would have to speak louder to be heard over a storm. The cost paid for invoking such a spell might well be greater, too, so that limiting spells used at range would be a way to guarantee that magicians did not exhaust or kill themselves.

And using little devices, as du Malphias did for controlling his pasmortes, that used the laws of magick might make invoking those spells easier. If like spoke to like through channels that didn’t involve air or, somehow, the intervening space, then magick might become even easier at range. Two halves of the same stone, no matter how far apart, might react within magick as if they were still part of a whole.

Vlad closed his eyes. Tangents and angles, symbols and their duplications, and the implications of all that spread through his mind. He could see the spells he knew lining up in a new order. If the spell to shoot a gun was near the top of the sun spells, then the spell to light a candle would be much lower. And, not surprisingly, he’d always visualized that spell as the sun dawning. The spell to extinguish such a flame he saw as the sun setting.

He saw what Ezekiel Fire had seen, though he doubted Fire had completely understood what he discovered. Prince Vlad could peel the limitations that clothed magick and take it back to its most raw and powerful form. He could provide greater access more simply for more people, which would make their lives infinitely easier.

And give everyone the chance to be corrupted by that power. In a heartbeat he understood why the Church had done what it did. In the next he feared what their knowledge would allow them to do. They had distributed grimoires so their selected agents would have access to advanced magicks as needed. Until Vlad knew who those people were, and why they were being given knowledge forbidden to the average man, he couldn’t judge whether their effort should be encouraged or destroyed.

And he wondered, as he opened a blank notebook and began to outline his own system of magick, if he would fall victim to infinite power or if his purpose-balancing the Church’s tyranny-might somehow save him from magick’s corrupting influence.

1 May 1767 Antediluvian Ruins Westridge Mountains, Mystria

“I hain’t never seen the like.” Nathaniel stared up at the edifice carved into the side of the mountain. The arches over doorways were formed by squids linking tentacles. More tentacles dangled from atop pillars. Even the way the stones had been carved to sluice away rain water had a tentacular pattern. Nathaniel had never much taken to the sea and sea life, and was more than happy nothing squidlike inhabited lakes and rivers.

Even odder than the general theme of the architecture were the two figures decorating the twenty-foot-tall and half-opened bronze doors. Age had imbued the doors with a green patina, but they didn’t appear to be weathered nearly enough for having existed under the water for more than a couple of years. The nearby mud didn’t have the sour stink of age, either. Given that he’d never heard of the place in Shedashee tales-and some of them recounted events centuries old-something definitely strange was going on.

The figures were male and female, right and left as one looked at them. The female, on the lean side, had ample curves to her and wasn’t wearing much more than the bronze patina. Aside from her being nearly naked, she could have walked down any street in Temperance Bay without attracting a considerable amount of notice. Her strong jaw, noble nose, and deep-set eyes suggested she’d be a hatchet-faced crone by the time she got old, but in her youth, she definitely presented a handsome image that any man would be happy to have enter a dream.

The male, on the other hand, would have attracted notice and most of it hostile. Despite being clothed in something falling halfway between a fancy gown and the sort of vestments Bishop Bumble wore on high Holy Days, there was no mistaking the fact that the man was skinny to the point of looking consumptive. If there was an ounce of fat on him it was because he pulled it out of some animal’s carcass and tucked it in a pocket. His long-fingered hands rested on the head of a staff. It rose to the middle of his belly, making it a bit longer than a gentleman’s walking stick. Though it wasn’t easy to see, the stick had a squidlike thing worked at the head, and that design matched the ring on the man’s left hand.