Authors: Miles Cameron
Mortirmir smiled and spread his hands. ‘But that would be wonderful,’ he admitted.
‘Aren’t you a student at the University?’ Comnenos asked.
‘Yes,’ Mortirmir said.
‘You’re exempt from military duty then,’ Comnenos said. ‘Far too important. Aren’t you supposed to be in class?’
‘Not for an hour,’ Mortirmir admitted. ‘I was bored.’
Comnenos nodded. Mortirmir had seldom had a friend so worldly and handsome – and older – and the other man’s willingness to listen to him was like a tonic. ‘Well, take a note to my fiancée for me, then,’ he said, and beckoned to his servant for papyrus.
‘Suddenly I’m an officer,’ he said. ‘Here, take this for her. No poaching, barbarian.’
He found Anna by the gate.
‘I heard you were here,’ she said. ‘The palace looks enormous, but really it’s just a little town full of gossip. Will you bring my clothes and things from Harald’s? He will be in barracks for weeks to come.’ She smiled up at him. ‘I’m sure he wants to thank you for fetching the doctor.’
In two days replete with adventures, finding a Yahudat scholar at midnight had hardly made his list of events. The man was so famous in the Yahudat quarter that the guards had fetched him before the bells had rung a single change.
‘And you will stay here?’ Mortirmir asked.
She smiled. ‘Nordikans are very direct.’ She laughed. ‘But I’m coming to like them. And I’m welcome here.’
He agreed to bring her things and trotted to his history lecture. He was late, but much happier. Only to find that the class devolved into a tour of the Academy Library, a collection of four thousand scrolls and books dating from the foundation of the Empire in distant Ruma. He was good at research so he scarcely attended to the lesson until they were deep in the archives below the old rostra where the Senate still met on occasion.
But the librarian had elected to take them to the map room, and when he produced a chart of the ground near Chaluns in Arles, Mortirmir snapped to attention.
‘Saint Aetius himself handled this map!’ said the librarian reverently. He placed a glowing globe of blue-white light over the middle of the map. When the nuns leaned in to look more closely, he courteously moved the light source to them, leaving Mortirmir to stare at it in shadowy frustration.
So he provided his own light. There was an illumination of an irk in beautiful, naturalistic strokes in his corner. He smiled at it, committing the picture to memory, and some time passed before he noticed the silence.
All of his classmates were looking at him. And the librarian pursed his lips and vouchsafed him a small nod and the barest hair’s breadth of a smile.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Yes. I – umm . . . Yes.’ He grinned in sudden triumph. He hadn’t even thought about making the light. He hadn’t even entered his memory palace to do it.
Antonio Baldesce, the Venike boy in his class, invited him to share a cup of wine. It wasn’t epochal, and he knew he was too young to be good company, but Baldesce was friendly instead of condescending.
‘You know Abraham Ben Rabbi?’ Baldesce asked.
Morgan shrugged. ‘I met him through a friend.’
‘And you met the new mercenary?’ Baldesce continued.
‘Not so much met,’ Morgan said. ‘He was not awake when I was there. I wasn’t introduced. Not to anyone.’ He remembered the older woman who burned like a torch with raw
potentia.
That sight he would take to his grave.
‘Don’t trust the old man, that’s all I’m saying. The Yahudat are venal beyond belief. Most of them serve the Wild in secret.’ Baldesce nodded. ‘If you go to the palace again, will you tell me? I might want to send a message to a friend.’
As Morgan emerged from his first social evening with a ‘friend’ from the Academy, he thought about Baldesce, who had never been particularly nice to him before now, and so obviously seemed to want something from him. A servant fetched his cloak, and Baldesce paused to answer a hermetical summons.
It occurred to Mortirmir that he might hang on to all the slights his colleagues had paid him. There were twenty-seven other students – serious, full-time hermetical students – in his study, and none of them had previously paid him the slightest heed, except to mock his failures or his efforts. He’d seen himself – too young, too arrogant, an utterly inept barbarian – so clearly through their eyes that only two weeks before, he’d contemplated ending his life.
Now he finished his cup of wine and told Baldesce that he needed to study, and the older boy nodded and went with him all the way to the door. ‘They say that the later you come to your powers, the more powerful you will be,’ said the scion of the Venike bankers.
Mortirmir searched his face for signs of mockery and found none, so he laughed. ‘In that case, I expect be very powerful indeed,’ he said. ‘I’m still in shock,’ he admitted.
Baldesce smiled too. ‘Come for a drink again,’ he said.
Mortirmir buckled on his sword and went out into the falling darkness. He walked across three squares to fetch Anna’s things from Derkensun’s inn and made sure that Stella and her husband had been paid for their food. In that neighbourhood, at least, he had a hero’s welcome, and he had no choice but to drink three cups of wine. Back at his own inn, and a little drunk, he fell into bed without undressing.
The next morning he had rhetoric and memory, two of the most difficult classes. If he had needed a lesson in how much had changed in his studies, rhetoric was that lesson – his inability to manipulate the
ops
had forced him to work very hard indeed in classes that did not involve direct hermeticism, and rhetoric had been one of them. Yet – now that he had even the slightest command of the
aether
, he understood as never before
why
the study of logic and grammar were so essential.
‘If you listen any harder, your tongue will loll out like a dog’s,’ said one of the nuns. He couldn’t tell them apart, but from her familiarity he had to assume she was Comnenos’s cousin. She had a magnificent set of lapis and ivory prayer beads on the girdle of her gown and he decided to use their fancy beads to name them – he christened the taller one ‘Lapis’ and the shorter one ‘Coral’.
He listened to the master grammarian say exactly the same things he’d said in every other class, and yet—
He considered the logik of the grammarian’s argument, and he applied it to the creation of light, and instead of the usual globe he made a perfect cube of blue-white light appear over his right shoulder.
The master grammarian didn’t pause in his lecture, which was largely based on the letters of a number of early Imperial senators. He wrote his usual scurrilous, slightly naughty Archaic verse on the blackboard at the end of class, but instead of twirling his long robe and stalking away down the long halls towards his lunch, he reached out an ascetic hand and grasped Mortirmir’s shoulder.
‘Now make a pyramid,’ he said.
Mortirmir did. His own confusion over whether it should have a square base or a triangular base made him to create an amorphous blob. It vanished in a
blop
of consternation, and he tried again, structuring his argument more clearly. It was difficult, because the threads of argument needed to be rooted in his memory palace, which was not all it should have been. In fact—
But he made a pyramid of light.
‘Now make it red,’ said the grammarian.
Mortirmir managed a shocking salmon pink.
‘Is the creation of light a true working, or an illusion?’ asked the grammarian.
Mortirmir saw that several of his fellow students had stayed behind. The question was not directed to him alone.
Two of the nuns raised black-robed hands.
‘Yes?’ said the grammarian.
‘Obviously it is a true working, since illusionary light would cast no light?’ said the nun that Mortirmir thought was the Comnena.
‘Oh, it is obvious, is it?’ asked the grammarian. He opened his hand, and a perfect pearl shone in the palm of his hand. ‘True making, or illusion?’ he asked.
‘Illusion,’ said Baldesce.
‘Correct, young Antonio. If I could create a pearl this perfect with so little effort, I would be the richest man in the city.’ The grammarian held his pearl up.
‘But to make the illusion work, you must make it both bend and emit light – as if it is actually there.’ Mortirmir put his hand over the teacher’s hand, and indeed, the pearl emitted the faintest glow.
‘By God’s mercy there is one of you paying attention,’ said the grammarian. ‘You’re – Mortirmir, aren’t you? Roger?’
‘Morgan, maestro.’
‘Of course. Barbarism piled on barbarism. There is no Saint Morgan.’ The grammarian smiled – only from one side of his mouth. ‘You have finally come into your powers, I take it?’
‘I think so,’ Mortirmir said.
‘There is no such thing as illusion. Or, contrarily, everything is an illusion.’ The maestro raised his wand and suddenly there was a great, horned daemon standing in the middle of the room.
Mortirmir hadn’t seen so much hermeticism displayed since he arrived. ‘But – I can’t see any
ops
.’
‘Well said. Anyone else care to admit the same?’ asked the master.
There was some shuffling.
‘Of course you cannot. Because I have placed the entire suggestion directly into your eyes.’ The daemon vanished. ‘It’s an incredibly difficult manipulation, but one that is undetectable. What does it prove?’
There was a long and heavy silence.
‘Well, well. Figure it out for yourselves. Mortirmir, you need to work much harder in memory.’
‘Yes, maestro.’ Mortirmir shook his head, still able to
see
the image of the daemon – on the back of his eyeballs, as his father used to say.
‘I think I hate him,’ said the smallest nun.
‘You just don’t like to think so hard,’ said the tallest nun. ‘Why did you make your light in the form of a cube, Ser Morgan?’
Mortirmir bowed. ‘For fun, demoiselle.’ He tried to imagine what she looked like. ‘I suddenly understood what all the grammar was for.’
Baldesce laughed. ‘Tell me!’ he said.
‘It’s the code we use. I’m sure Wild workers use a different code, but we use grammar to structure the power. Right?’
The other students nodded. ‘Of course,’ Baldesce snorted with some of his accustomed derision.
‘But in High Archaic, we can shape a sentence many ways and never change the meaning—’ Mortirmir was struggling with the words to fuel his concept.
‘Yes,’ said Baldesce.
‘But at the same time we can speak of things with such precision that—’
Baldesce all but slapped his own forehead. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I had only thought to manipulate the
ops
in the mould of creation. You are speaking of making minute changes to the mould itself – and to how the power fills that mould.’
The taller nun reached out a hand and produced a glowing, scarlet pyramid that threw a strong red light.
Baldesce, stung, made his bigger.
The smaller nun made hers very small indeed, and the three of them laughed. They were – by far – the three best students.
Mortirmir rolled the logic of his argument around for a moment and produced two.
They all applauded.
In the corridor, the taller nun – Lapis – bent her head slightly. ‘I’m Eugenia,’ she said.
‘I’m Katerina,’ Pearl murmured.
‘Tancreda,’ said the third, whom he had called ‘Coral’ in the privacy of his thoughts. Now that he really looked at them, he could see other distinguishing marks.
‘I’m the Plague,’ he returned. But he grinned as he said it.
They all giggled.
I may yet come to be good at this
, he realised.
They had two hours between rhetoric and memory, and they were walking across the square to an open-air taverna that only existed to serve the students when the Imperial gates opened and two men rode out – both wearing red.
Sister Anna watched the man ride by. ‘Handsome – just as Giorgos said. That’s the new mercenary. He calls himself the Duke of Thrake, but of course he’s not really.’
Baldesce raised an eyebrow. ‘I think he really is. He beat the former Duke pretty thoroughly last week. And my father hates him with a perfect, pure hate.’
Sister Katerina leaned out over their table in a very undignified way. ‘He’s going to the University!’ she proclaimed.
‘Why does your father hate him?’ asked Mortirmir.
‘My father is Podesta of the Etruscan merchants here,’ he said. ‘He was summoned to the palace and threatened. Or that’s how he tells it.’ Baldesce spoke with the amused tolerance of sons for fathers.
‘I’m sure that the Patriarch will put him in his place,’ Baldesce said. ‘But he cuts a fine figure. He’s Alban, like you, Mortirmir.’
Mortirmir resolved to like him.
Memory was a torture. In the first five minutes he learned that the master had ignored him because he had no access to Power. Now that that had changed, he was expected to catch up. Preferably by the end of the class.
That didn’t happen.
He was called on more in two hours than he had been since his studies began, given odd geometric shapes and other memory objects to store in his palace, and then asked to reproduce them. He failed – sometimes he barely failed and then, as he got increasingly flustered and frustrated, he failed more and more spectacularly.
The memory master was remorseless and, at the end of class, he took Mortirmir aside. ‘Your failure to memorise even the simplest form is shocking,’ he said.
Mortirmir wondered, in the safety of his head, if he could turn the man to ash. He certainly had enough rage and frustration to fuel a really powerful working.
‘I’ll – work – on – my – memory palace,’ he said through clenched teeth.
The memory master shrugged. ‘Oh, do as you please,’ he said. He swept out of the hall.
‘He likes to do that,’ Baldesce said.
‘He’s never picked on me before,’ said Mortirmir, who was very close to crying and didn’t want to give way in public.
Sweet Jesu, I can kill a man with fire, but I can’t face a mocking maestro.
‘You weren’t worth his time, before.’ Baldesce shook his head. ‘I’d invite you for wine, but I really think you’d best go work on your memory. I’ve been the target of his attentions myself and I really owe you – that’s the easiest I’ve had it in that class this year. Now that he has his teeth in you, he won’t let go.’ The Etruscan smiled. ‘It’s your own fault. When you had no Power, none of them cared.’