Lawrence Watt-Evans - Taking Flight

“But that’s not Ethshar,” Asha protested, “Ethshar’s way off to the west.”

“That’s the new Ethshar,” Irith said. “The Hegemony of Ethshar, it’s called. That was originally all conquered territory, and Old Ethshar was where the Small Kingdoms are now. It sort of fell apart, though.”

“Go on,” Kelder said.

“Well, anyway,” Irith said, “I grew up in Dria, and it was still part of Old Ethshar, sort of, but only because of the Great War. You know about that, right? How we were all fighting against the Northern Empire? And they had demons and sorcerers fighting for them?”

Kelder said, “We know about the War.”

“Well, because we were all scared of the Northerners, none of the Small Kingdoms fought each other much, and a lot of people just kept breaking off little pieces and setting up their own kingdoms, and nobody could do anything about it because we couldn’t afford to fight amongst ourselves, you see? But it made it harder and harder for the four generals to raise armies and protect us. So the war had been going on for hundreds of years, maybe a thousand years, but it was beginning to look like we might lose, or at least that’s what my parents thought. The news from the generals was good, mostly-General Gor was doing well in the west, and General Anaran was raiding the Empire’s borders, and everything-but Old Ethshar was coming apart.”

“What does this have to do with your spells?” Kelder asked.

“I’m getting to that!” Irith glared at him.

“Get to it, then!”

She glowered for a moment longer, then continued, “So everybody was very worried when I was growing up, and I heard a lot of stories about how terrible the Northerners were, and my parents were always talking about how everybody had to do everything they could for the war effort, and the king was always issuing proclamations about how Dria would fight to the last inch of ground and the last drop of blood, and all this stuff, and it was all exciting, and really scary, and I think it was a pretty bad way to grow up, but I didn’t have any choice, you know? So I was scared all the time, but I wanted to do my part, so I went and got tested at Dria Castle when I turned twelve, and they said I would make a good wizard, and the war effort always needed good wizards-we had much better wizards and theurgists than the Northerners did, which is why they didn’t win, even though they had much better sorcerers and demonologists.”

Kelder, seeing that this might actually lead somewhere, nodded encouragingly.

“So they signed me up as apprentice to a wizard who had retired from combat duty to train new wizards,” Irith went on. “Not in Dria Castle, up in the hills to the west. And he was a nice enough master, I guess, but he was older than anything, hundreds of years old, and he’d never married or had any kids or anything, so even though he knew just about all the wizardry there was, he wasn’t very easy to get along with, and he didn’t understand anything about what it was like for me, being a girl growing up like that.”

Kelder made a vaguely sympathetic noise.

“And I never really wanted to be a wizard anyway, and old Kalirin wanted to send me out to General Terrek on combat duty when I’d finished my apprenticeship, and he talked about my maybe doing research, but I knew that research wizards all get killed-I mean, they’re lucky if they last a month! And I hated it, all that fussing around with weird, icky stuff like lizard brains and spider guts and teardrops from unborn babies, and I mean, yuck! Who wants to be a wizard?”

Asha started to say something, and Irith cut her off. “Oh, all right, so it’s really great when a spell works the way it’s supposed to and everything, but there’s all that preparation and set-up and ritual first, and everything has to be just perfect-it isn’t all fun, you know. And they wanted me to learn all these awful spells for fighting with, that weren’t going to be any use for anything else, like blowing people into bits, and they didn’t care about any of the good stuff, like flying or shape-changing or anything. So I hated it. And by the time I was fifteen and was getting the hang of it all, the war was going badly in the east, and General Terrek was falling back, and how was I supposed to know he was luring the northern army into a trap? I thought we were going to lose the war, and the Northerners were going to come in and rape everybody and then kill us all, or torture us forever, or something. So one day when he was out somewhere I borrowed Kalirin’s book of spells and looked through it for some way to get myself out of it all, and I found Javan’s Second Augmentation.”

“Kalirin was your master?” Kelder asked.

“That’s right,” Irith agreed, “Kalirin the Clever. He’d been training wizards forever, practically-I must have been about his two hundredth apprentice.”

Kelder nodded. “So what is Javan’s Second Augmentation of whatever it is?”

“Well,” Irith said, “do you know anything about wizardry?”

Kelder considered for a second or two, then admitted, “Not really.”

“All right, it’s like this,” she explained. “Wizardry, as near as anybody can figure out, works by tapping into the chaos that reality is made out of-and if you don’t understand that that’s fine, because I don’t either, that’s just what Kalirin told me. It does this by taking magically-charged symbols-stuff like dragon’s blood or mashed spider legs-and ritually combining them in patterns that break through into that chaos. Or at least, that’s what the wizards think they’re doing, but nobody really knows for sure, they just know that if you do this and this and this, then that’ll happen. If you put a pinch of brimstone on the point of your … um, on your dagger and fling it in the air while you say the right magic word, it’ll start a fire-but nobody really knows why it does that, and why it doesn’t work if you try it with, say, phosphorus-I mean, phosphorus burns better than brimstone, so it ought to work, right? But it doesn’t. And it has to be a dagger that’s enchanted a particular way, too.”

Kelder nodded.

“And some of the spells take hours to do, or even days,” Irith said. “And some of the ingredients are a real nuisance to get hold of, you know? So it’s just not very convenient, being a wizard. It’s not like theurgy, where you can just call on a god and ask for a favor, or warlockry, where I don’t know what they do but it seems to work right away without any spells or equipment or anything.”

“So…” Kelder prompted.

“So,” Irith said, “this wizard Javan, who was some kind of genius or something, started looking for ways to get rid of all the rituals and magic words and rare ingredients and things. He wanted to find some way to get right at that chaos or whatever it is without all the in-between stuff. And he figured that if the ingredients are just symbols for something in the underlying chaos, then why can’t we use symbols of symbols? The way we use words as symbols, maybe. And he found a way he could sort of do this, sort of. He found a way to put spells right into a wizard’s brain, or his soul, or somewhere. He still had to do the whole ritual and everything, but he didn’t have to do it all just when he wanted the spell to work, he could do it in advance, and sort of store the spell in his head, ready to go. I mean, he could take some petrifaction spell or something that would take two days to perform, and he would run through the whole two-day ritual, and then his own little spell with it, and that would put the whole thing in his head, and then he could carry it there as long as he wanted, and then when he saw the person he wanted to petrify, he could just point and say a word, and that whole big fancy two-day spell would come pouring out of his head and down his arm, and bang! The person would be turned to stone.” Irith paused. “I think witchcraft works sort of like that, too,” she said, “but I’m not sure.”