C. Brittain: A Bad Spell in Yurt

“You didn’t have too much Christian tact to guess the lady’s age tonight!” I said with a laugh. If he could make a joke, so could I.

“The Lady Maria?” He considered for a moment. “Maybe it wasn’t tactful at that.” I began to wonder if he would be as good a person to talk to as I had hoped.

“Did the old wizard have these same chambers?” I said to change the subject.

“These chambers? No. In fact, I was rather surprised when I heard the constable was putting you here. The queen’s old nurse had lived here until she died last year; the rooms were then shut up until last week. The old wizard had his chambers in the north tower.”

I knew it. They weren’t taking me seriously. I could be ten times more powerful and mysterious in the north tower than in the old nurse’s chambers!

As though reading my thoughts and wanting to contradict them, the chaplain said, “Everyone was enormously impressed when a wizard trained in the great school answered the constable’s ad. The queen started talking at once about a telephone system.”

“Why a telephone, in the name of the saints?” I cried, using an exclamation I trusted he would understand.

He lifted his eyebrows at me. “The queen has found telephones extremely convenient the times she has been in the City. She thought that if we had a system here, she could phone here and talk to the king wherever she is, in the City or visiting her parents, rather than having to rely on carrier pigeons.”

The queen was clearly an important presence here in Yurt. I wondered if she could possibly be as old and bent as the king, since she seemed to take frequent trips, and when she would be returning.

The chaplain hesitated for a moment before speaking again, taking unnecessarily long over a sip of wine. It was probably Christian tact failing again to control his words. “I don’t like this talk of telephones,” he said brusquely.

“Neither do I,” I said cheerfully, but he didn’t hear me.

“The queen herself tried to persuade me that it’s only white magic, that it involves no dealings with the devil, but I can’t be sure. There must be black magic in being able to hear someone’s else’s voice over hundreds of miles.”

Since it could have been pink or purple magic for all I knew about telephones, I responded to a different aspect of his comment. “If you had been more friendly with my predecessor, surely he would have persuaded you there’s no such thing as either white magic or black magic. That’s only a popular perception. Didn’t they teach you that at seminary? Magic is neither good or evil in itself, only natural, part of the same forces as the world and mankind. The only good or evil is in the people who practice it.”

“And you don’t practice magic with evil intent?”

“Of course not,” I said self-righteously. A few student pranks hardly counted.

“Then why do you have a well-thumbed copy of the Diplomatica Diabolica if you don’t converse with demons?”

He was looked at my shelf. The volume’s spine was cracked; it did look well-thumbed. But that was from the time I had been reading it late at night, the night before the demonstration, and had become so terrified I had slammed it shut and it had fallen on the floor. That book gave me the willies.

“One prefers not to talk with demons,” I said. It didn’t seem appropriate somehow to tell him about that demonstration, about how two other wizards were there to help our instructor if they had to, and how when a very tiny demon, maybe a foot tall, had appeared in the pentagram, the room had gone totally dark and some of the students (not me!) had fainted in fear. “But one meets them occasionally,” I continued airily, “and if one does one had better know exactly what to say and how to say it. Otherwise, as you know yourself, one’s immortal soul is in danger.”

“But why practice magic at all?” he cried, his black eyes burning. “You put your souls in danger, and for what? Your predecessor used to entertain us with illusions during dessert, but that’s the only magic I ever saw him do.”

Illusions! Clearly I was falling down already. It hadn’t even occurred to me to produce special entertainment at dinner; I had enjoyed the brass quartet and the food too much to think anything else was needed.

“There’s lots of magic besides illusions,” I said. “You saw the magic lock I have on my door.”

“My door locks with a key. It works just as well.”

He had emptied his wine glass and was spinning it in his fingers. I said two quick words in the Hidden Language and the glass spun away from him, rose majestically, and slid across the air to my own hand. I refilled it and sent it sliding back without spilling a drop.

He had to smile at that. “Very deft,” he said. “But you could also have gotten up.”

“But wizards have known about magic since the beginning of human history,” I protested, feeling that I was not the person who should be having this discussion. I was also rapidly running low on the spells that I knew always worked. “You can’t turn away from knowledge.” He opened his mouth to speak, and I knew he was going to say something about Eden and the Tree of Knowledge. One thing they taught these priests in seminary was how to have quick answers to everything. “And magic works!”

“Every single time? You’ve never had a spell that didn’t work perfectly?”

Maybe they taught them to read minds too at seminary. “Well, maybe just once, or twice, or a few times…” But I realized that, if I was going to have him for a friend, I was going to have to be honest. “Don’t tell anyone else, but a lot of the time things don’t work out exactly as I expected. But that’s not a problem with magic. That’s a problem with me. If you do it right, magic always works.”

“You’re implying religion doesn’t?”

“You know it doesn’t!” I protested. “Lots of people pray to the saints all the time and never get anywhere, whereas if they consulted a competent wizard they’d always get results.”

“The saints don’t listen to formulae. The saints listen to pure and contrite hearts. You spoke at dinner of a voyage you thought you were not yet worthy to take. Doesn’t even magic make absolute demands on your mind and your soul?”

I felt I was being backed into a corner instead of sitting comfortably in my own study in my own kingdom, with the stars coming out through the window. “So what would you do if you met a demon and you didn’t know how to speak to him? Have you ever had to do an exorcism?” I paused briefly before continuing, taking his silence as a negative answer. “You can’t very well practice and study ahead of time to make sure you have a pure and contrite heart when the time comes. Suppose you meet a demon and you’ve had an impure thought a few minutes ago and, never having studied the Diplomatica, don’t know the words to say to keep the demon from being annoyed?”

“We have the liturgy and the ritual of exorcism.”

“See?” I said triumphantly. “You have to learn magic words too, even if you don’t call them that.”

He changed the topic abruptly away from demons. I was just as glad. I didn’t like talking about demons with it now full dark, even though one of my predecessor’s excellent magic globes was shedding a soft light in the room-I hoped the chaplain didn’t consider that an illusion.

“You say that magic always works,” he said. “But they must have taught you at the very beginning of your studies that there are only limited areas in which magic works at all.” For someone who claimed to have no knowledge of or interest in magic, he seemed to be able to guess remarkably well. “Since magic is part of the earth’s natural forces, it can modify them but never alter them irrevocably.”