Scholar of Magic

by Michael G. Manning

  He frowned. They seem happy now, but at the time we were scared to death. Funny how time changes one’s perspective. He wished desperately that Selene was with him now. He needed her calm resolve. Having been raised by a madman, she always seemed unflappable.

  A few minutes later, a knock came at the door. “Your companions are here, sir. Shall I let them in?”

  Will grunted an affirmative, and Darla and Tiny came in. Darla looked past him and immediately became more alert when she didn’t see her ward. “Where is she?”

  “Sleeping in the other room,” said Will soothingly. “Our meeting with the king was rather traumatic, but physically she is fine.”

  “Physically?”

  He gave them a quick description of what had happened, including the king’s bizarre games and cruel humor but omitting their philosophical discussion near the end.

  “You put her to sleep?” asked Darla, seeming offended.

  Will nodded. “I snapped. I killed all three and when she turned to me, the look of horror on her face… I just—I put her to sleep. She could have tried to resist the spell, but she didn’t.”

  “You shouldn’t coddle her,” said the former assassin. “She will be a great lady someday, but death and killing are things she must become comfortable with.”

  Not if I have any say in it, thought Will. Then he saw Darla head for the bedroom, and he moved to interpose himself. “Stop.”

  “I will wake her.”

  “Let her sleep. She’s been through as much as any of us. She may as well rest since we’re safe and she’s already out.”

  Darla’s eyes measured him. “And if I disagree?”

  “Then we’ll have words.” He pointed at one of the chairs. “Make yourself comfortable instead.”

  She lifted her chin. “I will guard the door. I do not trust the king’s men not to eavesdrop.” Moving away, the Arkeshi went to the outer door and stepped outside, closing it behind her.

  Tiny looked at him and shook his head. “I’m not sure I’d be so casual about offending that woman. She seems like she could just as soon cut your head off as look at you.”

  She’s a good kisser, though, Will remembered with a half-smile. He shook his head to clear away the thought. Was that a remnant of Laina, or had he been unfaithful in his thoughts? Will sighed. For the rest of his life he would likely be uncertain. He guessed it would be the same for Laina as well.

  “What now?” asked Tiny, glancing around to take in the room.

  Will noticed his friend slap his stomach a few times unconsciously. “Why don’t you and Darla see about having some food sent up?”

  “Sent up?”

  “The kitchens here are always busy. Get word to one of the servants, and they’ll send up enough food to feed even you.”

  Tiny was out the door before Will could say another word. Will laughed, then activated the limnthal. “Are you ready to talk?”

  “I’m at your beck and call,” said Arrogan in an uncommonly cooperative tone.

  “You lied to me. Repeatedly. Why?”

  “I was selfish,” said the ring.

  “Selfish? You could have told me you remembered everything. You could have told me you were really my grandfather, not just some magical copy. What could you possibly gain from hiding that?”

  “Peace,” said Arrogan. “For you and me. It hurts to remember, and I only have to do it when the limnthal is active. You’re still alive. I didn’t want you to know it was really me trapped in this ring.”

  “Well I know now, and I’m ticked off,” spat Will.

  “Is that all you’re upset about?”

  “Should there be something else?”

  The ring issued an audible sigh. “Just when I think you might not be utterly stupid.”

  Will snorted. “You must be referring to the fact that you’re not just a spirit of pure intellect, but the fact that you retained your will as well.”

  “It makes me dangerous,” said his grandfather.

  “Because you could attempt to steal my body, the way Ethelgren did?”

  “Yes!”

  “But you wouldn’t do that,” insisted Will.

  Arrogan lost his temper. “How do you know that, you little shit? Do you have any idea how tempting it is? I’m dead!”

  Something occurred to Will then. He remembered their previous conversation regarding Aislinn and her dual motivations, helpful and murderous. “She made you as a trap for me,” he said aloud as his thoughts clarified.

  “Damn right. And I’ve felt terrible about it ever since.”

  “But you didn’t have a choice, except not to do it,” countered Will. “And you didn’t.”

  “I could have told you,” said the ring. “But I didn’t. Do you know why?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I was afraid you’d get rid of me.”

  That didn’t fit with the ring’s constant begging to melt him down. “That’s not true. You were always begging me to put you out of your misery.”

  “I knew you wouldn’t, not unless I told the truth. And secretly, deep down, I’ve been keeping my options open.”

  “Options…,” muttered Will, tasting the word and finding it unsavory.

  “Yeah, options. As long as you keep calling on me, I could always change my mind. A new life waits for me, in your body. All I have to do is throw aside my scruples and do what Ethelgren did.”

  He mulled it over for a minute, then shrugged. “Oh well. I guess I’ll take that risk.”

  “You really are a fool.”

  “Not at all,” said Will confidently. “I trust you. We’re family.”

  “Did Laina kick you in your balls or your brain? Wait, never mind, that’s probably where you keep your brain anyway,” said Arrogan sourly.

  Will wasn’t fazed. “I learned something new today, about trust, and I think even the king was impressed.”

  Suspicious, the ring asked, “What was it?”

  He relayed what he had told Lognion about truth and trust, faith and people. Will wasn’t sure if he managed to say it quite as eloquently the second time, but he did his best to get the point across. There was a long pause after he finished, so he asked, “What do you think?”

  Arrogan didn’t hold back. “As philosophers go, you’re about the most laughable, shortsighted, and naïve one that I could possibly imagine. That line of thinking was so simpleminded and imbecilic that it barely merits a response. The king wasn’t impressed; he was stupefied. You probably lowered his intelligence just reciting that line of half-baked bullshit within his hearing.”

  “That wasn’t a counter argument,” observed Will. “It was just a string of ad hominems.”

  “How’d you learn such a thing?”

  “We studied logic last semester.”

  “Huh. Next even pigs will learn to fly,” snipped the ring.

  “You don’t have a decent rebuttal, do you?”

  “Get over yourself while I’m being nice. I don’t want to crush your tiny ego. Plus, it won’t do me any favors trying to win the argument, because then you’d have to get rid of me.”

  Will smiled. “I accept your surrender.”

  That triggered a barrage of swearing so intense that it threatened to blister his ears, but Will merely laughed through it all. When Arrogan finally wound down and ran out of new insults, Will changed the topic to the issue of the day. “I need your help.”

  “What else is new? Let me guess, you need me to tell you how to wipe your ass again?”

  “I need a ritual spell powerful enough to destroy all the vampires in Cerria without killing the people or destroying property.”

  “Oh, that’s easy.”

  “It is?”

  “Yeah. There isn’t one.”

  That wasn’t an option, so Will persisted. “Can we make one?”

  “So far as I know you’ve redesigned one spell. Don’t you think creating a strategic class ritual would be something of a reach?”

  “No
t for you.”

  “Just because I was one of the best wizards to ever live doesn’t mean I can just pull something like that out of my ass. Besides, we’ve been over the reasons why I can’t teach you even simple spells already.”

  “You could borrow my body and write it out, then we could switch and you could explain it to me,” argued Will.

  “No.”

  He was undeterred. “Why not?”

  “First, I’m not sure I could resist the urge to keep your body if I had it a second time. Second, even if I did, creating such a ritual is no easy task. There were wizards who dedicated their lives to that sort of thing. It was never my forte.”

  “I’d rather not ask Aislinn,” said Will.

  “And you’d be wise not to,” agreed the ring. “Besides, while she’s probably better at it than I am, it still wasn’t her strongest point. Have you thought about talking to some of your teachers at the college?”

  That caught him completely off-guard. He’d never heard the old man say a kind word about anything the school had to offer, much less the professors who taught there. “I only have a day. Do you really think one of them could help?”

  “Maybe. They don’t have to be able to cast it, but some of them might have studied the theory that goes into it. You just need to know how to push them in the right direction, assuming you can find someone that isn’t an idiot.”

  He rubbed his hands together, beginning to feel slightly less hopeless. Professor Dulaney might be able to help, or maybe even Master Courtney. “So what do I need to know?”

  “I’ll go over the basics. First, there are three major considerations for any ritual: desired effect, control, and power required. The desired effect and the circumstances that the ritual will be used under have a lot of impact on the other two.”

  “What sort of circumstances?”

  “Where, when, geography, active resistance, that sort of thing,” said Arrogan. “Control is achieved via one of two principal ways, people and ritual design. Power is—”

  Will interrupted, “Wait, explain control first.”

  “Rituals create large effects and utilize a lot of power, so finding ways to control that power, to properly channel it, is a major concern in ritual magic, much more so than in ordinary spellcasting. The ritual you stopped last year, for example, was controlled with a large, elaborate, and well-designed circle. The entire chamber, from the sacrificial altar to the control runes built around the ring, was all carefully orchestrated and thoughtfully planned; otherwise a single human could not have enacted that ritual.

  “But rituals don’t have to be controlled by well-designed circles. They can also be controlled by using extra manpower, auxiliary casters whose purpose is to help control and channel the energies being brought together. Rituals can also incorporate a mixture of both, so you can design it to match the resources you have. With a surplus of time and money, designing a circle is no problem, whereas if you have a shortage of those, additional helpers can reduce the need for a complex or expensive design.”

  Will nodded. “That makes sense.”

  “On to power. There’s lots of ways to power a ritual, but the two main ones are ley lines and people. Generally speaking, ley lines provide vastly more power, but that often creates more problems than it solves. Usually you don’t need that much, and in order to keep the effect at the scale you want, you have to overbuild your control parameters to keep the ritual from overloading. People are nice because you can add or remove participants depending on how much turyn you need. The trouble there often comes when you need more power than the people you have on hand can provide, in which case many desperate individuals resort to sacrifice, since killing one of your sources can more than double the turyn they provide.

  “So, to make a long story short, if you’re using people to power your ritual you generally don’t need nearly as much effort put into control, because the power matches the ritual more closely and because the people providing that power can also assist with control functions. Understand?”

  “I think so,” answered Will. “At least I know how to present the problem. I need a ritual that can destroy every vampire within the confines of the city, without hurting innocents. There’s a ley line in the city, and I know its location, so I could probably…”

  “Not going to work,” interjected Arrogan.

  “Why not?”

  “You told me you sealed it off, right?”

  “Mmhmm.”

  “So, nothing has changed since you were last there. You have one day. You’d need to reopen it, get a crew of workmen down there and rip up the old circle, then lay down the new one that you just so happened to design while tearing out the old one.”

  “But can’t I use people to control it?”

  “Ley lines contain a lot of turyn. To use one for a ritual without an elaborate control ring would be an absolute mess. I doubt you could even get enough people into that room to even try it that way. Honestly, ley lines overshoot the power requirement by such a large amount that I’ve never even heard of anyone using just people to provide control. There’s always a ring design incorporated.”

  “So what am I going to do? I’ll need…,” Will paused. “I guess I could use a lot of sorcerers. The king alone probably has an untold number of elementals under his control.”

  “There’s also a limit on the amount of power a single caster can provide,” Arrogan informed him. “So the king isn’t going to be able to use a hundred elementals and power this all by himself. You’ll need numbers of actual living people, not just someone with a bunch of elemental slaves.”

  Will mulled that over for a moment. “It isn’t that I don’t believe you, but why can’t you get the power from a few people with lots of elementals?”

  “It falls back to control once more,” said Arrogan, “but this time at a level below that of the overarching ritual structure. An individual can only control so much power at a time. Lognion might have ten, or a hundred, or a thousand elementals, but that power has to go through him before it can go to the ritual, and an individual can only handle so much without being obliterated by their own power.”

  “Oh. So I just need a lot of sorcerers, without really worrying about how many elementals each has since they can only supply so much turyn.”

  “Essentially, although a sorcerer with more elementals will be able to provide power for more time before being tapped out. Proper wizards would be better in almost every respect.”

  Will was no fan of sorcerers, but he didn’t see why that would necessarily be the case. “Why is that?”

  “Control and sustainable power. Wizards in my day developed their will to a greater degree, and that enabled them to contribute more to control in a ritual like this. And while they didn’t have elementals, they could draw a considerable amount of turyn over an almost indefinite period of time. I don’t have any way to guess for sure, but I’ll bet you wind up needing twice as many practitioners for your ritual than you would have back in my time.”

  “Well, there’s no shortage of sorcerers from what I can tell,” offered Will.

  “But there’s a serious shortage of wizards. I hope you realize how dangerous this will be for you.”

  “Isn’t it always?”

  “No, I mean this ritual specifically. You are the only true wizard left. They couldn’t begin to perform a hastily constructed ritual based on casters without a wizard at the heart of it. It’s going to take someone with a degree of turyn control and discipline that these modern turds couldn’t even begin to approach.”

  He sighed. “But I’m up to the task.” Mentally, he added, Right?

  “Are you? You’re still new to all this. I have no doubt your will is strong enough. You bested Ethelgren to regain your body. You even took a spell away from him, so you’ve definitely got the necessary inner strength, but what you lack is experience. You’ve only dealt with one ritual in the past, and it used symbols and structure to provide most of the control. If
there were other wizards—real wizards—it wouldn’t be so bad, since they could share the load.

  “But even if you have every sorcerer in the city beside you, you’ll still be alone, because they’re nowhere close to being able to help you control it,” finished the ring.

  “Wait, but you just said they’d be providing control, instead of the ring structure,” said Will, feeling confused.

  “Yeah, the rough overall control, but the fine work in the center, that’s all going to be on your shoulders, and don’t let the term ‘fine work’ fool you. Without highly skilled assistants, it’s going to be hard as hell. If you slip up and lose control, it will rip you to shreds. There won’t even be a body. They’ll have to mop you up to have a burial.”

  “How comforting,” said Will wryly.

  Chapter 48

  Tiny and Darla returned, heavily laden with food. Not only that, but they had recruited two servants to follow them with large platters piled high with roast fowl, lamb, pig, and a collection of sides, pastries, and desserts. Will gaped at their haul.

  “Did you leave anything for the rest of the palace?” he asked.

  Tiny’s face broke into a wide grin. “Apparently the head cook panicked when the king started bringing in all his troops and guards. Rather than run short, he made too much. We were doing them a favor.”

  Spreading their feast out on the floor, they sat down around it and then they fell to with a will, demolishing the plentiful pabulum, until at last even Tiny leaned back and patted his swollen belly with a sigh of satisfaction. Darla made no overt gestures, but Will could see that her eyes seemed to blink more slowly, as though she was fighting post-prandial drowsiness.

  “Did you eat too much?” Will asked her.

  “Never,” she replied in a no-nonsense tone. “The Arkeshi are trained not to overeat, lest we become slow in our reactions.” To illustrate her point, she rolled back until her shoulders were on the floor and her feet were in the air. Kicking up with her legs, she flipped her body neatly up onto her feet. A loud noise accompanied her feat of agility, and her cheeks reddened as Tiny began waving his hand in front of his nose.