His master cast his combined spell and it again did not work as intended. Instead of moderate growth and increased strength and endurance, the growth was stronger in effect. Benen saw the room shrink around him alarmingly and bent himself over to avoid knocking his head into the ceiling. Soon, he was fourteen feet tall and sitting curled up in the room. The wizard was shaking his head in disappointment.
“We’ll try again tomorrow,” he said. “Do shrink yourself back down, boy.” The wizard left.
Benen had to shrink himself, using an unfamiliar constellation, while unable to move. This resulted in a costly spell. This being the second such botched spell in short succession for Benen, he fell unconscious at its completion. He awoke a bit before dinner feeling absolutely wretched. Worse, he was still larger than he should be. He was almost ten feet tall!
Never mind that for now
, he told himself and hurried to the kitchens. He had to make supper.
Not having the time or fortitude to waste on casting spells to get his work in the kitchens done, Benen decided to do things manually this once. Unfortunately, this was when he found out what the wizard had done to him. When he tried to do things with his hands, they fumbled everything. He cut himself trying to peel potatoes before giving up on the manual way of doing things.
Have to hurry!
he thought. He needed to get everything ready for the wizard in time for supper.
Using his strength sparingly, he did all the steps with magic and managed it just in time. He served supper as a ten foot tall youth and drew only a mildly raised eyebrow from the wizard. After supper was served, Benen barely made it back to his room. Once there, he vomited in the loo and curled up right there to sleep. He could not have moved over to his bed even if it had occurred to him. He slept till mid morning the next day and woke up to find himself still ten feet tall.
He sighed and got on with the new day.
It turned out the wizard really was doing Benen a favour with the curse. Given no other choice but to use magic for everything his hands would normally do, Benen got more practise than ever before. Of course, before the curse, Benen had been trying to use magic for everything already. The problem was that he would let himself use his hands or other mundane means when he didn’t feel like going through the effort of casting a spell. With the curse, he had no choice, and so wound up using magic for almost everything. His progress accelerated.
Soon he was able to concentrate on other problems. First he took care of his size, returning himself to his usual height. Next he came back to the stain and his need to understand the weaves of magic. Without this knowledge, he realized, he couldn’t remove an effect from something with multiple enchantments without potentially removing the wrong effect; worse, he might remove more than just the one he wanted.
To supplement the book learning he was doing on the subject at night, Benen cast the spell that revealed the traces of magic and left it operating on him at all times. He was surprised the first time he cast a spell while his magical sight was active. He could see the strands forming before him. It was so distracting that Benen failed to continue the spell and paid heavily in pain and suffering for the lapse.
Still, this gave him the idea that he could try to create a stain and look at the resulting whorls and pattern. Comparing his stain to the other magically created one might not reveal the same exact layout of lines, but it should give a hint as to which parts of what he was seeing belonged to the effect creating the stain and which belonged to others.
Benen was therefore puzzled when he put this plan into effect and the resulting magical pattern bore no resemblance to what he was seeing when he looked at the area where the stain was. He went back to reading his book.
In the laboratory, Benen would let himself be distracted by the beautiful patterns of lines the wizard created during his experiments. The sight was so distracting that he failed to do his part in one particular experiment and the wizard punished him with a spell inflicting excruciating pain, like fire in his nerves.
“Get out of here, useless boy,” the wizard said. “You’re just leeching my power and returning nothing of worth!”
Benen retreated from the laboratory and resolved to pay better attention in the future. He was haunted by the wizard’s mention of his leeching power from him. He didn’t know what that meant. At the nearest opportunity he asked Orafin.
“Did he really say that?” the rat was alarmed.
“Yes, why?” asked Benen. “What does he mean?”
“You’ve been growing your reservoir of magical power a lot since you started casting spells all the time,” the rat answered.
“But that’s
my
reservoir,” Benen objected. “I’m not taking anything from him.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Orafin said. “You
are
taking power from him.”
“But I’m not!”
“Think of magical power as water, flowing over the surface of the world.”
“Ooookay.”
“Now, accept that the layer of water — magic — is rather shallow and the surface of the world is mostly smooth.”
“Okay.”
“Wizards, with their capacity to use magic, act as a depression in the surface. The resulting pool is their reservoir.” Benen narrowed his eyes at this. He didn’t like where this was leading. “As your reservoir grows, you become a bigger and deeper depression in the surface, acquiring a bigger pool of the water. Put two such depressions close to one another and they start splitting the available water between them, with neither pool being filled to its capacity.”
“So, now that I have a bigger reservoir, I’m hindering the wizard’s ability to fill his magical reservoir of power?”
“Yes,” the rat agreed. Benen was confused as to why the rat saw this as bad news.
“But this means that he’ll have less power when I go to fight him!” Benen was excited, this seemed like a good thing to him.
“The wizard can do more with less than you can,” Orafin pointed out. This dampened Benen’s excitement somewhat, but he still saw it as a point in his favour.
“But I can wait a while yet, and learn more before confronting him.”
“Perhaps,” the rat appeared dubious of this possibility, “but you will have difficulty matching his eight hundred years of experience. Worse, Benen, now that you are actively draining from his reservoir, he might think your usefulness has come to an end sooner rather than later.”
Benen gulped. He wasn’t ready for a confrontation with the wizard yet. Certainly, he had learnt more in the past year of his apprenticeship than all previous years combined, but he was still far from the power level of the wizard. Even with Orafin helping out, he didn’t think his odds of winning were good.
“I need to learn more and fast,” Benen declared. Orafin agreed and did what he could to tutor Benen.
From that point on, the boy barely slept; using magic to restore wakefulness when he spent more than twenty-four hours awake. When he did sleep, he used magic to make it more productive, reducing how many hours of sleep he needed to recuperate.
He worked himself hard for eight months, a time during which the wizard grew more and more distant and hostile. He ceased wanting Benen in the lab and didn’t give him lessons in person; he sent him books to read and study. The distance suited Benen, it allowed him to set his own pace and to make his own decisions as to what he needed to learn. This also allowed him to spend more time under Orafin’s tutelage: the rat was a far kinder and better teacher than the wizard. Of course, the rat’s uprising depended on Benen being well-trained, so he was an interested party and it showed in his teaching.
CHAPTER 6: UPSTART
At the end of eight months of intensive training by Orafin, both the rat and Benen thought the day of their reckoning with the wizard was not far. Benen had not seen the wizard except at meals, which Benen still served. For their part, Benen and Orafin thought they had used the time to good effect and that Benen was as ready as he was likely to become, given the constraints. The wizard would make a move against the boy soon, Orafin was convinced and said so.
This began a tense period in Benen’s life, when he was awaiting death or liberation. Every morning, he was pleased to discover he was still alive and had the hope of another day of preparation before the dreaded moment. Orafin, based on experience, thought the wizard was likely to challenge Benen to a duel instead of striking at Benen while he slept or through some other underhanded way. They could not take that for granted though, and Benen found that the few times he slept, he slept lightly, ready to spring up and fight if needed.
These days of preparation were mostly filled with Benen casting spells on himself or his environment to help him in the coming confrontation. He had begun with spells tied to the Pinnacle and the other constellations near it that never rose or set as seen from their location. Those spells would not need to be renewed daily. He then started casting spells that were tied to the stars and celestial bodies that rose and set daily. Those he had to re-cast every day. It gave him great practise in casting these particular spells, and spells from those constellations in general.
The linchpin enchantment Benen and Orafin were counting on was a
sink
. This spell, provided by the Parallels, caused magical energy in an area to pool on one spot. This deprived other nearby areas of magic and would prevent a wizard from filling their reservoir, making them operate at a reduced capacity. It was a long spell to cast and took quite a bit out of a wizard, so was rarely used in conflicts between two magicians, but given that Benen had a reasonable expectation of where the fight was going to happen, he could try to rely on the sink to provide him with an edge. If he could manage to stand on it, the effect would mitigate his lack of reservoir strength in relation to the wizard.
After the sink, their next best weapon was confusion. Every day, when the constellation known as the Mask of Heaven rose, Benen would cast a spell that created a phantasmal duplicate of him. He would move the duplicate into a wall, being insubstantial, and leave it there. Then he would repeat the process, seeding duplicates into the walls around his quarters and other potential confrontation spots. Creating twenty duplicates every day was tiring, but he knew this effect would save his life if the wizard attacked him while the Mask of Heaven was in the sky.
The next bit of confusion Benen and Orafin had planned for the wizard was a spell using the Pinnacle. Since it stayed in the sky perpetually, they did not need to recast the spells over and over. The spell Benen was using allowed him to telekinetically move the enchanted object with his mind. He cast it on almost all the loose objects in his room and worked his way out from there into the rest of the tower, concentrating on the kitchens next; this being the next most likely place where the wizard would attack him.
Finally, Benen cast the spell allowing him to see the lines and patterns created by magical effects in the world around him. He had made definite strides in understanding what he saw and Orafin insisted that he have the spell on any time he possibly could, since the effect would give Benen a chance to know what the wizard was casting as he cast it, thereby gaining a chance to counter the wizard’s spells. Of course, this assumed Benen understood what he saw. He kept practising, watching the product of his own casting to learn the patterns they created.
In the spirit of perfecting his deciphering of magical patterns, Benen returned to his study of the stain that had eluded his previous attempts at eradication. He knew he could not simply destroy the stain, he had tried that; it had come back. This told Benen that some effect had to be recreating the stain whenever it was purged. He looked around and saw a pattern of magical lines he believed were the results of magic associated with the planet Oros. This seemed promising to Benen, since magic from Oros was associated with filth and decay. Using his magic dispelling effect from The Cleaver constellation, Benen broke that particular effect.
It unravelled and disappeared. The stain was still present, so Benen used a different, cleaning, effect from the Cleaver on it. The stain disappeared as well. But as he watched, it returned. Looking around, Benen saw that the effect tied to Oros had also returned.
Undeterred, Benen dispelled the Oros effect once more and waited, watching it. The effect did get properly dispelled, he saw, but was recreated a few short seconds later. With his sight, he could even see a whorl of lines twitch when the effect reappeared. He looked at the suspect lines of magic and couldn’t make heads or tails of it. He sighed and decided to take a chance.
He dispelled the Oros effect and then, quickly, before it had a chance to act, he also dispelled the unknown whorl of lines. A flash of bright red light washed over him from that spot. For a time, everything he saw was coloured red. He didn’t know why the red light had happened, but he was unharmed. Looking for the Oros effect, he was pleased to see that it had not come back. He cleaned the stain then and this time the area stayed clean.
Satisfied, Benen returned to his room. It wasn’t until his eyes stopped seeing red everywhere that he noticed his clothes and his skin had become red; bright red.
Orafin took one look at him and burst out laughing.
“The wizard must have laid a trap for you that you failed to spot, my young friend,” the rat said.