The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic (34 page)

The magician's study was as she remembered it, a room virtually encased in books. The rows of dark volumes along the wall and ceiling gave the room a cavelike feel, and yet it seemed almost cozy as she mounted the last steps. There was a flickering yellow glow from what seemed to be dozens of candles burning along the walls—surprisingly extravagant for Aruendiel, until Nora saw that the small lights were not attached to candlesticks. It was the pale flame that he had conjured in the library at Semr, now dispersed into luminescent droplets. Aruendiel himself was hunched over a table by the fire, two books open before him while he wrote rapidly on a sheaf of papers.

“You said you had a job for me?” Nora inquired. She had an instant's fear that he might have forgotten.

Aruendiel raised his pale eyes for a moment as he dipped his brush into the inkwell. “Over there,” he said, nodding to the other table.

She followed his gesture and saw, among more unshelved books and scrolls, a sizable heap of broken crockery. It looked as though someone had smashed an entire set of dishes.

Nora seated herself at the table and began to pick through the fragments. A few pieces were as big as her palm, but most of the shards were tiny. She tried and failed to picture the original form of the thing she was trying to reconstruct. The broad curves of the larger fragments and the few lines of red and yellow glaze that decorated them offered no obvious clues.

“What is this?” she asked after a few minutes.

“Can you not tell?” His tone did not invite further questions.

By sheer chance Nora found two pieces that fit together. Holding them next to each other—combined, they were no larger than a quarter—she saw they bore some sort of raised pattern. She began hunting through the fragments for similar pieces. There were many, although none of them seemed to fit the ones she already had. The jigsaw puzzle from hell, she thought. Not even a picture to go by. The last time she worked on a jigsaw puzzle had been at the age of twelve, during a rainy vacation at the shore. It was a view of St. Giorgio Maggiore; she and her brother had never finished it, defeated by the luminous, identical waves of the Venetian lagoon. In the intervening years she had not once had the urge to do another.

Yet now, sorting through the broken crockery, she felt a sense of slow recognition. Her fingers had touched this clay before. It even seemed to her that she had some sort of claim on it. Is this something I made? Nora asked herself. No, it was too old for that, it had spent a long time in the form that it was in. But this clay knew her and seemed pleased to feel her touch again.

Two fragments grew together in her hand, and then without even thinking about it, she laid her fingers on a third piece that fit with them, melding seamlessly into place. She let this odd, intuitive intimacy with the clay guide her hands—the trick was not to concentrate too much—and gradually, as she added fragment after fragment, a form began to emerge from the broken pile.

An animal with a rather human, playful expression, and a mass of curls, like a great wig. “I should have known it was you,” she said, fitting part of a round ear into place. Her old friend the lion from the palace in Semr.

Footsteps sounded overhead. Nora looked up with a start as Aruendiel came down the spiral staircase. She had been too absorbed in her work to hear him go upstairs.

“You recognize that now, of course?” he said.

“It's the statuette that Ilissa broke.”

“No, the statuette that you broke. Or, rather, that threw itself off the mantelpiece at your request.”

Nora frowned, remembering the tawny blur of movement and a secret thrill of pleasure that had seemed out of place in the middle of her fear. “Did I really do that?”

“No one else did.”

“But I certainly didn't intend to. How could I have done it?”

“The same way that you are mending it now,” he said, with the twitch of an eyebrow. “You reached an understanding with the elements from which it is made, and they responded to your will. Of course, what you willed them to do was not very powerful or sophisticated magic,” he added, “but you have achieved the first, most basic step in working true magic, upon which everything else is built.”

Nora wanted to protest, feeling that inspiring a clay figure to animate itself and then to dash itself to pieces was magic of quite a sophisticated order, but he had not answered the question to her satisfaction. “Nothing like that ever happened to me before. Why me, now?”

“That, I cannot answer,” Aruendiel said, a shade of displeasure passing over his angular face. “You remarked at the time that you had been working in the garden. I wondered whether you had awakened some natural sympathy in the clay. If digging could produce a capacity for magic, though, there would be many more magicians and fewer farmers.

“Perhaps the Faitoren spells to which you were subjected made you more sensitive to the currents of natural magic. I know of one case in which a man developed an aptitude for magic after undergoing a powerful enchantment. Or it may be that this world remains strange to your senses in some deep way, and therefore you perceive things differently from those born here.”

It would be nice to think that being an alien here brought with it an unusual talent—some compensation for feeling like an idiot so much of the time. Privately she was not quite sure that the explanation was so easy. “How do magicians—people who want to become magicians—how do they discover that they can do magic?”

“Usually boys are sent off to school or to apprentice with a magician, and some of them discover that they can work magic and some discover that they cannot. Those who can work magic become magicians.”

“Is that what you did?”

“I went to school, yes. I had teachers.”

“And is that where you discovered you could do mag—”

“Once a person acquires some understanding of magic, the more interesting question is—what do you do with that understanding?”

“Well, I'd like to learn more,” Nora said quickly. “Become a magician.”

“Developing real skill in magic requires a great deal of work,” Aruendiel said harshly. “It is not like fitting together a few broken pieces of pottery.”

“I understand.”

“It is no trivial pastime, to be dropped whenever it becomes dull or discouraging.”

“Of course not.”

“Years of painstaking, often tedious study are needed, for true proficiency.”

“I'm used to that.”

“It is sometimes dangerous.”

Nora nodded. “I know.”

“Knowing about the risks is not the same as experiencing them.”

“It seems to me that I've already run into quite a lot of danger in this world by
not
knowing anything about magic.”

“Hmm. Even great skill in magic is no substitute for good sense,” Aruendiel said. “That is not something that I can teach you.”

“But you can teach me to be a magician?”

“I can teach you to work magic, yes. Whether you can learn enough to call yourself a true magician, that is still unknown.”

“All right. Well, there's only one way to find out.”

Aruendiel gave a cursory nod.

“What happens to the boys who go to school and then discover they can't be magicians?” she asked.

“They find another occupation. Some memorize a few spells and set themselves up as wizards. There is always some demand for basic spell-working in the villages.”

“I hate to admit this,” Nora confessed, “but I have never quite understood the exact difference between wizards and magicians. Although I gather,” she said, seeing Aruendiel's frown, “that it's better to be a magician.”

“You are even more ignorant that I expected. Must I define the most elementary terms for you? Very well, let the first lesson commence. Wizardry is the branch of magic that depends upon commanding various magical creatures to do one's bidding. The wizard does not work magic directly, but relies upon the power of spirits or demons—or more commonly, upon spells that bind spirits or demons to perform certain specific tasks. That invisibility spell that you read some time ago, that was a spell addressed to a particular demon, Contemptuous Needle Unsound.”

“That's its name?”

“Demon names are difficult to pronounce, at least for humans. Most demons choose a name in Ors that are rough translations of their own names, or that they fancy will be intimidating. They do not always grasp the nuances of the language. At any rate, that invisibility spell is a rather poorly drafted command, addressed to Contemptuous Needle Unsound, to hide the speaker from those who might be following him.”

“Why is it poorly drafted?”

“Because it is vague. There are a number of omissions—most important, the invocation does not say how long the invisibility must last. There is no provision to stop the demon from making the wizard visible again whenever he likes, or never. A good spell of this sort will include a very specific list of directions to the magical servant, so that the wizard does not have to rely on a demon's goodwill in interpreting any small ambiguity in the wording.

“You see, this sort of spell is really a compact between a demon and a wizard, one that is invoked each time the spell is recited. Which is why it would not work for you.”

“You said it was because I was a woman,” Nora said, unable to keep the resentment out of her voice.

“Yes, because a demon will not consider itself bound to honor the agreement if the spell is spoken by a woman.”

“Why not? Demons consider women inferior?”

“They consider all humans inferior,” he said coldly. “The restriction on women originates with the language of the spell's underlying contract, which is almost always defined as a pact between Fiend and Man.

“Wizards, then,” he went on, “practice magic only through indirect agency. It is possible for a man with no magical ability at all to become a wizard, simply by acquiring a book of spells.”

“So wizardry is really rote learning,” Nora said. “Whereas magicians are more creative, more powerful—?”

“Wizards can be quite powerful,” Aruendiel corrected her. “Wizardry should not be underestimated—it was the magic that I learned when I was young, the only accepted form of magic at the time, and we used it to great effect. Wizardry is still a good entry point into the study of magic. But natural magic, real magic, is more powerful still, and you do not have to rely on a demon to wield it. I don't see you writing any of this down,” he added. “You must have an excellent memory.”

“Oh,” Nora said, looking around quickly, “do you have a notebook that I could use, and something to write with?”

“A notebook? Paper is too dear for a pupil. There are some wax tablets on the table. You should take down each day's lesson; when you have learned it, melt the tablet clean and use it again.”

“All right,” Nora said, when she had located a stylus and made a few notes, “so real magic—or natural magic, you called it—is what mended the bowl?”

“Correct.” Aruendiel had crossed the room to hunt along the shelves. He brought two volumes back to the table and leafed through them. “Here, this is one of the classic spells for repairing broken pottery, from Hom Marn the Silent. And this is another, very different approach to the same problem, from an anonymous Vinovian wizard. Once you have learned them both by heart, you will identify for me the essential elements of these spells and explain why each wizard organized his spell as he did.”

The Hom Marn spell took up most of two pages of an oversize book. The Vinovian spell was shorter, but written in a crabbed hand that Nora could barely decipher. “But this is wizardry, isn't it?” she said, disappointed. “Why do I have to memorize these spells, especially since they probably won't even work for me?”

“They will not,” agreed Aruendiel. “But you must still learn these spells, their parts, how they are structured, until they are second nature to you.”

“I already know how to mend broken pottery.”

“Could you mend a pot that has been ground into dust? Or rebuild a pot from a single fragment? Or mend a pot that you have never seen, whose pieces are scattered to the far corners of the earth?”

“No,” said Nora, trying to estimate how often a magician might have to take on the more complicated sort of pot-mending project. “But is it really neces—”

“You must learn how spells are constructed, and this is how to begin. Once you have a basic understanding of the forms, we will discuss how to cast these spells with true magic.” Turning back to the other table, Aruendiel sat down and picked up his brush again. “The sooner you begin, the more rapid your progress.”

Nora began to read through the Hom Marn spell, fighting down a feeling of faint unease. What had she gotten herself into? But then Aruendiel had warned her of the obstacles ahead. This is a test, she thought. He's trying to scare me to see how serious I am. The reflection steeled her as she tried to understand the purpose behind each of the nine variant openings to Hom Marn's spell.