White Mage

by Jolie Jaquinta

  Chapter 13

  Art

  A thin, brass wire was stretched tautly across a frame. Holding it with delicate pliers, Miasma lowered it carefully into position amongst a nest of other such wires. With her other hand she threaded in a slender rod to meet up with where she held it against a brass plate. When the two touched there was a bright spark, and the wire was neatly cut. She touched them again and there was a thin trail of smoke as the wire was welded to the frame. She blew on it, inspected her work, and then picked up the wire and sought the next position to attach it to.

  She worked intently and with focus. Her greying hair was drawn up away from her face, and her sleeves were tied up at her shoulder. Small scraps of brass glittered around her, reflecting the magelight that burned in the lamp. The bench was in the corner of a room made of the one-piece stone walls of magically extruded structures. A stove was along one wall, with some barrels of produce, and shelves of crockery nearby. Other large tables were set up with maps and crystal structures laid out carefully on them. Dark doorways stretched to other rooms.

  The magelight flickered and guttered briefly, although there was no breeze at all in the room. Miasma paused briefly, still holding the wire with pliers in one hand, and slid a kettle across the stove to a hot spot with her elbow. She then finished attaching the wire, and put her instruments away as someone walked in.

  “Welcome back, Goatha” said Miasma. Standing up and dusting herself off. “The kettle is just on. The water should be ready in a minute. There's some stew left in the oven if you are hungry.”

  “Thank you,” said Goatha. She laid Eadwyn's belt with the crystals across one of the tables. She took a stone tankard from the shelf and placed it next to Miasma's. She fished out a few pinches of herbs from various boxes and put them into the cups.

  “Eadwyn's new readings?” asked Miasma, pointing to the belt.

  “Yes,” said Goatha.

  Miasma clucked her tongue and moved to the belt.

  Goatha poured the kettle as it began to whistle. While the cups steamed the kettle refilled itself, Goatha picked up a thick rag and explored the oven.

  “She did well this time,” said Miasma, enthusiastically, running her hands along the crystals.

  Goatha shrugged. “She was able to take many more readings. But with much the same results.” She lifted the thick stewpot to the surface and looked inside. “Would you like some?”

  “No thanks,” said Miasma. “I was just about to go to bed.”

  Goatha looked over at her workbench. “Is that a new collector?”

  “Good gracious, no,” said Miasma. She had pulled up one of the patterns from the crystals and was looking at it. “Just something I'm puttering with. I used to make stained glass before I became a mage. I still like to create things for relaxation. Helps me sleep.”

  Goatha scooped some stew into a bowl, and returned the pot to the oven. She then moved to look at the workbench. “I don't recognize the shape. What is it?”

  Miasma's face was lit by the lines of the vortex pattern as she enlarged one recording. “Oh, hmm? Nothing practical. I thought some of the captures looked pretty and wanted to do something based on them. I do it occasionally before bedtime. It clears my head.”

  Goatha lost interest and sat, eating her stew. “We'll summon another storm at the same font in a few days. That will give Jacques some time to create another array of collectors.”

  “This one is nice,” said Miasma, opening up another pattern. “I like the detail over here.”

  Goatha watched distractedly. “The resolution goes down with multiple images, not up. I don't think they will help find areas of low flux.”

  “Oh,” said Miasma, sorting through a few more patterns. “There was another message from Jesca.”

  “Did the Queen have anything new to say?” asked Goatha. She scraped another large spoonful of the thick stew.

  “Same old, same old,” said Miasma, zooming in on another pattern.

  “Asking progress. Stressing the importance of this. Declaring it our only hope?” asked Goatha.

  “You got it,” said Miasma. She had brought a part of the pattern over to her workbench and was comparing it with her sculpture.

  Goatha sighed. “Unfortunately she is right.”

  Miasma moved back to the belt and started on another crystal. “I thought Demara might be able to talk some sense into them.”

  “Into the government or the gods?” asked Goatha. The bottom of the stew was getting thick. She got up and poured some hot water into it.

  Miasma laughed. “The gods! She actually seemed pretty pleased with Jesca's declaration at Greymount.”

  “I don't think the gods will deal unless they are forced to,” said Goatha. Her stew was now more like soup, and she sipped it. “And we're too weak to force them.”

  “Thus the overwhelming importance of filling up the mana tank,” said Miasma. Then, “Aha!” as she found another interesting pattern.

  “I wonder if my daughter is on the right track,” said Goatha. She put down the empty bowl and picked up her tea.

  “With the Ævatar?” said Miasma. She had found another pattern segment and brought that to her bench. “That takes a lot of mana to sortie.”

  Goatha shrugged. “Not as much as an army.”

  Miasma scratched her chin. “Now if we could plug an Ævatar into a vortex. That would be a sight!” She went back to the belt.

  “We had hoped to, indirectly,” said Goatha. “Via the strategic mana reserve. Collectors pumping mana in, the Ævatar drawing down from it. To pull directly we would have to mount a large collector on the Ævatar itself. And, of course, it could only operate from within a vortex storm.”

  “Mmm hmmm,” said Miasma, zooming out another pattern.

  “Of course one large collector could be more robust, and sustain a higher maximum flux,” continued Goatha. “But an Ævatar is a large sink, and could take quite a lot of energy.” She mused for a while, watching Miasma spin the pattern to different orientations. “A vortex would make a pretty impressive shield, though. Moving it is a solvable problem. Eadwyn has touched on the basics. The problem is we don't know how to create one other than at a vortex font.”

  “Yes!” said Miasma. “Yes, yes, yes!”

  Goatha looked up from her tea questioningly. Miasma all but danced from one work table to the other. She had a bit she had clipped from the pattern held in her hands. Goatha walked over to watch more closely.

  Miasma arranged the pattern along with the other two. She then held up her wire sculpture and compared it to them. “This is the bit I liked,” she said. “I was trying to copy it here. I just wasn't sure what it looked like from underneath. Eadwyn finally got a scan from that angle.”

  Goatha stared at the patterns. The swirls and writhing tentacles had been drawn taught into filaments. They formed an interlacing pattern of lines and spaces.

  “I kind of got how they connected above,” said Miasma, indicating the top of her sculpture. “But I wasn't sure how they all worked out at the back.” Miasma overlapped the three patterns she had clipped, adjusted them, and more of the structure could be seen. “I was worried they intersected or overlapped. Something I wouldn't be able to do with brass. But I think I can sort this out.”

  “I have not seen this before,” said Goatha. “When I've overlaid patterns the resolution gets lower, not greater. It all just gets fuzzy.”

  “Well, I'm just picking stuff at random.” said Miasma. “It may have more to do with glitches in the crystals we are recording things in than the random chaos of the vortex. That would explain why I'm actually seeing some sort of order.”

  “Show me where you clipped these from,” said Goatha.

  The two of them moved over to the belt. Miasma pulled out the patterns from the sequence, rotated and zoomed them in. “There. I think that's where I got them from.”

  Goatha crossed her arms and frowned, staring hard at the patterns. Miasma watched her for
a while, and then picked up her tea and came back. “Let’s go outside,” said Goatha. She picked up the belt and Miasma followed her through the vestibule and into the waste.

  It was pitch black and silent. There wasn't a living thing in the waste and no wind at present. Just a ceiling of millions of brilliant stars, far brighter than anywhere else. Goatha laid the belt down and started a spell. She created a few basic patterns, connected them up, and then activated them. A copy of each pattern in the belt leaped into existence, enlarged to twice her height, and spread out in a long line to either side of their station.

  The walked down the line of them. “This one?” asked Goatha, pointing at one.

  “Yes,” said Miasma. “But like this.” She rotated and moved it slightly. They repeated the operation on the other two points she had.

  “Where are you going with this?” asked Miasma.

  “You may be right, that it is an artifact of the crystals,” said Goatha. “But, if so, I want to prove it.”

  Miasma shrugged. “OK. But how?”

  “You can to move the image in those three spots for a clear view of the region you wanted. We have done so, and they are aligned. Assuming they represent a fixed spot, either in the recording or in what was being recorded, if we align the other images accordingly, we should see a consistent pattern.”

  “But I aligned each differently,” said Miasma.

  “Yes. I thought we might interpolate those adjustments for the in-between settings,” said Goatha. “its elementary patterns work, but I'm trying to think how to put them together.”

  The two of them sketched out patterns and joined them in different ways. Eventually Miasma though to make a pattern of the adjustments, and they duplicated mixtures of the adjustment patterns for each of the recorded patterns. All the ghostly images up and down the line snapped into new alignments.

  “Nothing,” said Goatha. They both sighed. The images had leapt up and down and were barely in a line at all.

  “Hmmm,” mused Goatha. She gestured again and they all consolidated into a single location. It was just as blurry as before. “I thought they might consolidate once they were aligned,” she explained. With another gesture they coasted back to their original positions.

  “Wait,” said Miasma. “I thought I saw something there. Do that again.” Goatha consolidated and dispersed the images again. “These are moments in time,” said Miasma. “I think we've got it wrong to try to see them all together, either in one location or separate locations.”

  “What are you suggesting?” asked Goatha.

  “Let’s look at them one at a time, but only for the moment they were captured,” said Miasma.

  Goatha folded her arms again. “Again, simple transition patterns. But a complicated combination.”

  “We need to extend the pattern-of-arrangement trick and add in a time element,” said Miasma.

  The two of them went back to tracing elementary patterns and connecting them. The stars swung overhead as they puzzled it through. However, it was straightforward, if difficult. And they slowly whittled it down to the solution. Everything being set up, they energized it.

  Before them hung the ghostly pattern of the vortex. Impossible tendrils and distended shapes gleamed. That pattern faded into the next, somewhat offset. And then the next and the one after it. Instead of chaos, though, a phantom of structure emerged. It was fleeting, as the point of view rapidly shifted. Something hovering at the edge of one pattern, was full on in the next, and nearly vanished in the one following. They were complex and ethereal, but they were definitely there.

  “Well fancy that,” said Miasma. “It was in front of us the whole time.”

  “This changes everything,” said Goatha.

  “We need to fill in the blank bits,” said Miasma. “But at least we know where to look.”

  “Yes,” said Goatha. “We need to record from many points at once. Change of plans. You go back to the Academy and see if Jacques can multiply up smaller recorders. We can go for a broad sampling rather than a long sampling.”

  “Good idea,” said Miasma. “You should go and tell Eadwyn. She'll be really excited.”