by Guy Antibes
Jojo barked out a laugh. “I might not be the best person to learn perspective from, but now that your grasp of Benninese is sufficient to listen to my rants, we might learn a bit from each other. I once thought I knew it all, but…” Jojo raised his arms again and pointed to himself. “I wasn’t able to avert the disaster that has placed me here.”
Trak nodded. “Why don’t we write a list of principals to live by?”
“We can start, but such a list never ends, you know.”
“I need to learn to write in your language, and perhaps I can document what we gain from each other in the dirt of this mineshaft,” Trak said.
“Once we do that, perhaps we can move to more practical matters, eh?” Jojo said.
~
Trak walked through the rain to the mine. Now that the wet season had begun, the inmates wore capes of bundled straw to shed the worst of the rain. The raised cobblestone pathway to the mine kept the trail from becoming a quagmire of churned mud. At least the rainy season didn’t coincide with the colder dry season that had been the case when he arrived at the camp four months previous. He had seen Tembul a few times and Sirul only once. They weren’t able to talk, but his friends looked healthy enough,
With the ability to get five hours a day of intense instruction, Trak became a model student. They spent three hours engaged in tough physical labor that Trak could tell had made him stronger. He had grown out of his clothes and now wore the same kind of cast off rags that hid Jojo’s physique. Trak learned how to read and write Benninese as well as speak it fluently.
His sword forms had also grown more powerful after he started using a heavy metal pick for his practice sword. As Jojo taught him his letters, Trak taught Jojo how to use a sword. They both became proficient as their time in the camp passed.
“Sit,” Jojo said, when they reached the end of their shift. “It is time to share. We have spent enough time together to be friends, am I right?”
“I can trust you, Jojo,” Trak said, and he meant it. He hoped he had learned enough about how to navigate his way through Benninese society to know he would never have successfully spirited away the princess when he first came to Bennin. The mission hadn’t lasted very long until he had been caught out months ago, but now he could speak and read the language and knew enough about the myriad of Committees and the Bureaucracy to have a chance of success.
“That is heartwarming to hear,” Jojo said sarcastically, but he clapped Trak on his shoulder. “Now it’s time to teach you magic without poses. I read about it in a book on magical theory written by a Pestlan magician. I am teaching this to you with the knowledge that you know that lesser lights cannot do what I will teach you. I can barely make it work, but from what you said, your friend, Tembul, might pick it up. I fear the other Toryan will only kill himself if he tries.”
“I learned the perils of trying to spell with my mind, the hard way.”
“Yes, I remember. Putting yourself to sleep with your friends and enemies in a remote cabin will usually get you killed.”
Trak could only nod, since it almost did.
“The key to poseless magic is to understand the theory of how magic is made. The pose and the power word are necessary constructs. They take the place of intense concentration and discipline of one’s mind. Even after I learned the poseless technique, most of the time I still trust more in magic created by poses. Do you understand?”
“I do.”
“Good. With you, concentration is essential, since you have multiple power channels in your body due to your parentage. It’s not just your racial mix, but the capacity of magic that your parents and grandparents passed on to you. First, I will teach you to read the magical capability of others. This goes further than merely sensing power, but seeing the flows inside you. The Toryans have a pose for this, so you told me. Using my technique, you will be able to surreptitiously assess each magician and non-magician in the camp as you pass your fellow prisoners. We will start with this since you won’t risk damaging yourself or others.”
“I’ll be able to read them while I walk past?” Trak said, doubting Jojo’s claim.
“A rough reading. If the subject stands still, with their arms out from their sides, you will get a more accurate measure. Close your eyes.”
Trak had nothing else to do, so he did as Jojo requested.
“Concentrate on my body. You can locate me with my voice. That will be good enough. The goal is to sense pale streams of light running up and down my limbs and coalescing in my chest. It may take a while, but if you keep that visual, you should see something appear in your mind. Don’t think of anything else.”
Resting his arms at his side, Trak visualized Jojo standing in front of him. It took some moments, but eventually his face and body became a black outline in his mind, and then suddenly he could sense energy pulses. He didn’t see it as pale strands, but as spurts, like imagining blood pumping through veins.
“What do you see?”
“My picture of you turned black, and I can see pink pulses, like blood veins. They aren’t pale. The pulses are stronger closer to your midsection, probably below your heart. It seems that there must be something equivalent to a magic heart inside of you that pushes the power out." Trak opened his eyes and the vision stopped immediately.
Jojo put his hand to his chin. “I am sure I’m as amazed at you as all of your teachers have been. I expected you would see the black outline and a hazy glow. Pink, you say?”
Trak shrugged his shoulders. “I suppose it was pink.”
“The concentration was right here?” Jojo placed a fist just below his ribcage in the middle.
“That’s probably the right place. It seemed that the pulses radiated from it.”
Jojo walked around Trak. “You have it in the reverse. That is a nerve center in the body, and for magicians it serves as a collector of power, not a distributor. Your body collects energy through your skin. If you noticed, pulses would be stronger in your legs, since the greatest source of magic comes from the earth.”
“I was taught that power comes from the ground.” Trak thought about his theory discussions with Ben Nomio, his Colcanan mentor.
“Indeed. Look at me again.”
Trak closed his eyes and spent a few moments getting past Jojo’s physical appearance. The outline reappeared. “I see the outline.”
“To test that my outline isn’t your imagination, watch me move my arms.”
The figure had been still the first time, but Trak could see Jojo’s movement. “You are moving your left arm.”
“I am indeed.”
Trak kept looking, and with Jojo’s coaching, realized that he had seen Jojo incorrectly, the pulses did move towards the energy collector, not away, and the pink color was more intense, if that term could be applied to what he saw, in Jojo’s legs.
“I can see you were right,” Trak said. He opened his eyes again. “Is everybody’s color pink?
“Bennin magicians have pink colors. Your colors are silvery. I suppose that is a result of the racial mix. The Toryan’s are green, as far as I can tell.”
“That’s fitting since they live in the forests of Cokasan. How can I do this when I’m walking?”
“With practice. You will spend the rest of the week practicing. I can’t tell you what makes a strong magician or a weak magician. It is a personal calibration, except a paler energy stream generally indicates less power collected.”
“But my eyes will be open.”
“You’ll have to learn how to split your mind, and that is the second part of this lesson. I can only teach it after you pass the first part.” Jojo nodded. “And you did that rather well. This is better learned sitting.” Jojo crossed his legs as he sat down. Trak noticed that some Benninese did it that way, and others leaned forward and knelt while they sat.
Trak crossed his legs as well.
“Put your arms on your knees and close one eye. This is a visualization technique, so you will have to have one eye
closed when you evaluate another as you walk. Picture a hole on the side of your head where the eye is closed. This is a visualization chamber. You will train to see the body outline in this section. The open eye is used to make sure you don’t fall down or run into a wall. You have to concentrate on two things, suppressing the information in your open eye and concentrating on the chamber.”
Trak nodded. “So the open eye information is dampened, like you are looking through hazy glass.”
“That’s one way of putting it, but don’t make the glass so opaque that your mind can’t automatically avoid you running into something. Now try it.”
Two days later and after a number of sessions of trying, Trak finally succeeded in visualizing Jojo sitting in front of him. He couldn’t quite make out the pulses, and they were more like the streams of hazy color that Jojo first described.
“Try it when we walk back to camp today. The spell doesn’t matter if it is day or night,” Jojo said. “In a few days we will progress to other spells.”
~
Trak now had a good idea about the magic potential of the inmates. Most people collected magical energy to some degree, and some collected better than others, but didn’t have a developed energy center, that Jojo now called a plexus. Others had a brighter plexus, but their energy streams were weak. Magicians had both. Of all the magicians in the camp, only two or three were stronger than Jojo, and all of those had pledged Jojo their support to take back their country.
He now understood why Jojo felt Trak gave him hope. When Trak finally looked at his own arm through his magical eye, the streams were bright and silvery, liked Jojo described them. Tembul knew many more poses and was nearly as strong as Jojo, but Sirul was a bit less than average for those Trak had characterized as magicians.
Jojo had also schooled him as to what potential meant. Honor Fidelia had hinted at what Jojo made plain. Without the ability to understand and concentrate on one’s power, a magician’s capabilities were dependent as much on his ability to pose as it was on magical power. Trak thought about it in terms of efficiency.
They finally filled the cart up for this shift, and the two men rested before their five hours of idle time.
“What now?” Trak asked. “I can easily see your power flows without having to concentrate very hard, and I’ve graded most of the men in the camp.”
Jojo smiled and nodded his head. “And quite accurately, too. It’s time to move to the next stage. We will be treading on dangerous ground, but I think I’m the one who is in the most danger. Your powers of concentration are well developed for one your age, or really one of any age. Instead of using posing to physically channel your energy, you use your mind to focus on the end result. You have gotten a glimpse of the technique while you’ve mastered the detection of others’ energy. Now you have to feel the amount of energy that you emit from your plexus and use your mind to focus that energy into what you want it to do.”
“The tricky part is controlling the energy?”
Jojo clapped his hands. “You are right, it is. If you send out too much energy, you can literally explode, but what happens more often is that you overcook the spell, and your plexus empties completely. When that happens, you may be in a position not to be able to fill it again.”
“I’ve nearly expended my energy before.”
“Yes, you have, and using your sword as a focus to increase the amount of energy you put into a spell, you know how depleted you can be.”
“So few magicians can control their spells, because you have to control the output internally to do that?”
“Pretty much,” Jojo said. “I can do it poorly, and there are three others in this camp who can at my level. You might call us Masters of something in your Santasian Magicians Guild. Here we call the ability Elite Level magic, but none of us can do it well.”
“It works, but not quite, is that it? Colcan would exile any magician who could perform poseless magic.”
“If your case is typical, they certainly would.” Jojo clasped his hands together and stretched a bit. “Loosen up your body, since we need you to be relaxed to start.
Jojo ordered Trak to sit. “Look at your hand and imagine a small magic light ball. Small being a key visualization.”
Trak did what Jojo asked, but nothing happened. “Am I doing this wrong?”
Jojo shook his head. “No. Now imagine a trickle of power moving from your plexus to the magic light which will sit a few inches above your fingers.”
“Oh, I get it. I will see a trickle of power through the spell I generate, and then I’ll be able to imagine how my body will push the energy out to invoke the spell.”
“Right.” Jojo moved to the other side of their shaft and closed his eyes. “Proceed.”
Trak clenched his fist and let his hand unfold. He held his hand, cupped, with thumb and fingers curled upward. “Small light,” he said. A tiny ball of magician’s light floated where he had imagined it. “Larger,” he said and observed the light get larger. It became too large. He removed his hand, but the light followed his hand as if it was on a string. “Stop.” He visualized the power being cut off and the light disappeared.
Trak wiped off beads of sweat from his face.
“Did you feel yourself begin to panic?”
Trak nodded. “When I couldn’t cut off the light by collapsing my fingers, I recognized my error and had to concentrate on the energy flow.”
“And now you see why poseless magic is dangerous. I could see your flows, and when you recognized the light had expanded too large, you became anxious, so the flows increased, and the light continued to grow, but you figured out the proper solution in the end and simply cut off the flow. What would have happened if you continued to panic?”
Trak had no clue other than the energy would continue to go through him. He shook his head.
“The light would have gotten progressively larger, and that much energy collected outside yourself might have caused an explosion.”
“And that is what generally happens to those who attempt poseless magic?”
Jojo nodded. “The book postulated that if a magician could control the output and cut it off, then they could learn to perform any act of magic by will alone.”
“Could that be an offensive weapon?” Trak asked.
“Offensive? You mean throw the light ball? I’ll have to think about that. We can certainly experiment doing that with small balls of light.”
Trak could tell he was well ahead of Jojo in his thinking on the possibilities. “With poses you would have to move your hand, and if you do that too much, you break the spell. You can project fire and lightning because that is part of the pose. With a poseless spell, you can combine effects, right?”
“You aren’t supposed to realize that yet, but I guess so. The advantage of poseless spells is that they can produce whatever effect you can think of to harness natural energy, and they can persist. If you call the wind, the effect lasts as long as the pose. With practice, you can call the wind, and it will continue to blow until you stop it consciously.”
“Since the Colcanans didn’t know how to control the energy flow, any attempts at poseless spells would necessarily fail,” Trak said.
“Yes, necessarily,” Jojo said.
“And practice and practice. Your spells might produce unintended consequences. Most of the magic in Bennin is still performed by poses—”
“By the high-born.”
Jojo raised his index finger to make a point. “And those nobles are pledged to the Vashtan puppet Central Committee. I was one of them, but since I refused to pledge loyalty to a Vashtan-influenced government, I suffer here along with plenty of others.”
“Yes.” Trak looked at his hands. “When I used my sword to cast a spell, I knew I increased my power flow, but I didn’t understand the theory behind it.”
“Wands do the same thing.”
“I see.” Trak paused. “I have a lot to think about.”
“I ask you to only pr
actice down here. If you are going to attempt anything dangerous, ask me to leave our own little mineshaft.”
Trak remembered the practice mazes he had used in Colcan and Santasia. “I will.”
“Use your discretion. If we are found out, our escape may be required before we can adequately prepare.
The shift ended, and Jojo and Trak moved up towards the front to get to the mess building sooner. Their exercise always made them require more than a single helping.
As they picked up their straw rain capes, six guards circled them, aiming crossbows at them.
“Follow us, and no tricks, or you will get hurt,” Naroki, the Chief Guard said.
~~~
Chapter Eight
~
VALANNA LOOKED DOWN AT THE MEAL SHE HAD FIXED for herself. She wanted to think, and cooking while thinking seemed like a good idea. She had been out in the market early in the morning, and now faced her midday meal.
Could she trust Coffun Cricket? He had seemed to agree with her a bit too readily. Perhaps Esmera had softened him up a bit, although she didn’t know why Esmera would do such a thing. At least, she could get some information on Podor through the little man. Asem was positive that Podor had aligned himself with the rebels or traitors or whoever they were. She needed to call them something in her mind.
The very thought of seeing Podor Feely again revolted Valanna to her very core. Her experience living with the man had been dreadful, but then she had spent most of her time going to tutors or studying with Trak. She had never met a less trustworthy man than Feely. Then she was a Warishian spy in Pestle, as well, so how trustworthy was she?
She shook her head. ‘Concentrate on the mission,’ she told herself. Her actions would help make the Warishian takeover less bloody. Asem had explained that clearly to her, and since she had participated in a rather bloody civil war first hand, she understood.
She had sat down to eat when she heard a knock at her door. Who could it be this time? She opened the door, and another familiar face re-entered her life.