The Spellmonger's Yule: A Spellmonger Series Short Story

by Terry Mancour

  “Once one learns the art of writing, it’s terribly hard to give it up,” I pointed out. “I am a wizard, after all.”

  “And I am a foolish old woman,” she sighed with wry humor. “I should never have underestimated you, Minalan. Humanity continues to surprise me. You are here because of your poor wife, Alya?”

  “You’ve heard what has happened to her?”

  “My granddaughter does her best to keep me informed of what is going on in the wider world, but her visits are rare, and what she brings me is sparse. Ithalia fears running afoul of the Council.”

  “So she does,” I nodded. According to the parchments she’d taken a great risk bringing us here in the first place... a risk borne out by how the Enshadowed faction responded to our presence. The Enshadowed hated Lilastien and her family, thanks to some ancient slight or insult. “And with good reason. But many things have changed in a very short time.

  “But what concerns me today is the state of Alya’s mind. I want you to examine her, and tell me if there is any hope of her restoration.”

  She regarded me thoughtfully. “You think I have the skill to do so?”

  “If you don’t, can you suggest someone who could?”

  “A fair point,” she conceded. “Why don’t you tell me what happened to her,” she said, patting the seat next to her on the couch. “Tell me everything, dear boy. Leave out no detail, however unimportant.”

  So I did. Dusk had long past when I had exhausted my abilities to describe the Battle of Greenflower in thaumaturgical detail. Servants brought us wine and refreshment twice, and we missed dinner in the common room below.

  But I did as she asked, and she asked a thousand questions, it seemed. A few I didn’t have answers to, since I was unlearned in Alkan songspells and their version of advanced thaumaturgy. But I did my best, and at the end of the marathon recitation I felt drained. I’m certain the old Alkan learned far more from me than I thought I was telling her, but that’s just how their elders work, sometimes. Even Onranion managed to tease out some subtlety from human interactions that escaped me, sometimes.

  Finally, she rose. “Return to your friends in the guesthouse, and I will examine Lady Alya tonight,” she proposed. “In the morning, perhaps I will have an answer for you.”

  “Perhaps?”

  “My dear boy, I am as out of my depth here as you are,” she said, sadly. “There is so much about this I’ve never seen before. But I will do my best,” she promised. “It’s been a long time since I delved into a human mind, and I might be rusty. But I will do my best.”

  *

  *

  *

  The next morning she summoned me with a human servant. This time she had me meet her in her laboratory. It seemed vaguely familiar, for some reason.

  “Do you want the good news or the bad news?” she asked, without delay.

  “Both.”

  “Alya’s mind has been shattered like a vase,” she said, matter-of-factly. “The feedback from the destruction of the irionite matrix overwhelmed her neurology and fractured the underlying psychological architecture into pieces. Like she was struck by a bolt of lightning, thaumaturgically. Compared to the readings I took five years ago, there’s just barely enough there to sustain basic life.

  “What I was able to do,” she said, cautiously, “is difficult to describe without instructing you in both human neurology and Alka Alon magic, both of which would take years. But to use a convenient metaphor, through hours of perseverance and painstaking work, I’ve managed to take a few of the largest fragments and... knit them together,”

  “How do you mean?” I asked, confused.

  “To put it in enneagramatic terms, I’ve jammed the most-intact elements of her personality – not merely her memories, but her basic responses to the universe – and make a few tenuous connections to string them together. From a psychological perspective, I helped re-establish her ego – or at least a few central parts of it. From a thaumaturgical approach, I’ve restored a few points of integral cohesiveness among the fragments of her huomal bodies, encouraging the flow of energies in a supportive manner.”

  “What effect will that have on her?”

  “We won’t know for a few days,” she admitted. “I’ve never done that kind of work before. I was improvising the entire time.”

  “I appreciate your candor,” I said, with a small grin. “That’s how I operate, most of the time.”

  “It’s good practice, whether you’re a doctor or a wizard, I suppose: I just don’t usually admit it to the patient. But we won’t be able to tell whether Alya had a good effect from the procedure until her body and mind rest and heal from the additional trauma. Hopefully the connections I established will properly knit. I dosed her heavily with sedatives and neural factors to encourage growth, along with a restorative and regenerative field. It’s the best I can do,” she said, apologetically.

  “So... it’s in the hands of the gods?” I asked, wryly. “They’ve already had a go.”

  She reached out and put a small hand on my arm. “Minalan, the fact is, it will take more than a god or two to put your wife’s mind right, again,” the Sorceress said, sadly. “The way she was injured, where she was injured, have fractured her mind in ways I’ve simply never seen before. They alone are the reason that she yet lives,” she said, shaking her tiny head.

  “So what can I do?” I begged. “I’ve exhausted my resources. Including the gods whose acquaintances I’ve made. I’ve tried every Imperial magic spell. Not even the power of the Snowflake can repair her,” I lamented. I’d been careful to avoid mentioning the Snowflake’s role in the Battle of Greenflower.

  “Snowflake?” she asked, curious. “ What snowflake?”

  “I... I’ve had some adventures, apparently, since my honeymoon visit. When my son was born – the one Alya was pregnant with, when we came – it was in the middle of a snowstorm. It was a difficult birth. There were complications. Magical complications,” I clarified, “in addition to the normal ones.”

  “What kind of complications?” asked the Sorceress, frowning suspiciously.

  “The baby did not want to part from his mother,” I explained. “There was a magical attachment. I know little of such things, but it was clear he wasn’t about to turn loose of her, and it was killing them both. I had no choice. I had to... make it up as I went. With Briga’s help and a whole lot of power I improvised a spell.”

  “Did you... loose the baby?” she asked, her forehead wrinkled with concern.

  “On the contrary, the improvised spell worked. I convinced him to let go, and parted their arcane shrouds enough to let the midwife take over. But... well, it transformed everything in a two-mile radius of my castle.”

  “Transformed into what? ” she frowned, suspiciously.

  I sighed. Time to come clean.

  “The spell produced a wave that transformed all of the silica in the area-of-effect into... well, we call it snowstone,” I explained, taking a smooth, egg-shaped sample out of a pouch and handed it to her. “It lowers the thaumaturgical resistance in its immediate vicinity. Tremendously.”

  “I... I can see that,” the old Alkan woman agreed, her eyes wide. “I’ve never seen anything like it before! How did you...?”

  “I wish I knew,” I shrugged. “As I said, the gods were involved. Briga, specifically.”

  The Sorceress grunted unfavorably as she led me to a table and chairs at the side of the room. One was humani sized, thank goodness. She complained as she went. “Of course. It had to be divine magic. Your people and your gods!” she said with unexpected disdain as she examined the snowstone egg.

  “I thought you had a good relationship with the gods?”

  “A few of them are all right – some are fascinating. But they keep violating the rules of reality in a way that is, quite frankly, troublesome.”

  “I’ve noticed that,” I sighed. “When the birth of Minalyan – my son – I invoked her in a moment of desperation, in the m
idst of the spell. The spell worked, and it also created the snowstone as a side-effect.

  “But that’s not all. It also transformed several natural deposits of silica-bearing crystals in underground vesicles in the mountains around the castle. I’ve had a sample of them assayed by the Karshak. They are... exotic. Some of those crystals have quite unusual – nay, unique – properties, from what the Karshak, my own wizards, and the Alka Alon have informed me.”

  “Tell me about them!” she said, excitedly, handing the snowstone egg back to me. There was an eagerness in her voice and a look in her eyes that told me that this was an unexpected – and novel – thing. I’d seen it on the faces of my own wizards, when they’d latched on to an idea. Only in Lilastien’s case it went beyond mere interest and flamed instantly into obsession.

  I could see in that moment why she’d earned the name Elre. Rebel . Telling her my most intimate thaumaturgical secrets, things I’d hidden from the gods themselves, was likely to be dangerous, I instantly knew.

  So I did. I told her everything, and she drank it in like a barfly in a distillery after hours. I spent nearly an hour explaining the various gems and minerals, and what we’d discovered about them. Then I told her about using the Ways, and how my overuse of them had caused a fevered dreamscape and (again, with the assistance of the gods) my subconscious built the quasi-molopor I called The Snowflake.

  “It drinks in energies as a natural feature,” I explained, “and its ever-changing nature seems to constantly shift the thaumaturgical harmonics it produces. It was a powerful, potent artifact, as it was. Then we augmented it with an enneagram to help control it, and made it more powerful.” I didn’t see a need to elaborate on what kind of enneagram, or where it originated – my rule of thumb is revealing one mind-bending wonder at a time.

  “And you subjected Alya to this... thing?” she asked, shocked.

  “I was desperate,” I insisted. “And as Alya was responsible in part for the original spell – or at least deeply associated with it – I was hoping she would have some special affinity to the thing.”

  “But it didn’t work,” she supplied.

  “No, but it didn’t hurt ,” I defended. “In fact, it might have done some good. Briga and Ishi didn’t see any harm in it, although using it concerned Herus. And she did seem to improve a little.”

  “Why was Herus involved?” she asked, curious.

  “He’s been a worry-wort since I granted him enneagramatic continuity,” I dismissed. “Since he gets around a lot by nature, he seems to collect concerns like pilgrim medals. Briga wasn’t worried. Much. I trust her the most, since she was the author of the crystals, in a way. They’ve been as valuable to my endeavors as snowstone and irionite,” I admitted. “Particularly the one that can permanently affix a divine enneagram... which made me quite popular in some lofty circles.”

  She looked at me sharply, more troubled at my explanation than I’d expected.

  “What did you say?”

  “I can make the enneagrams of the gods permanent with one of the stones,” I explained. “So that they have continuity between incarnations.”

  “Oh, dear me!” the Sorceress said, shaking her head and frowning. “That’s not going to sit very well with... well, a great number of people!”

  “Why not?” I asked, puzzled.

  She sighed, heavily, and looked around guiltily. “Let me summon some wine and food,” she decided. “I need to tell you some things about the gods, and it’s going to take some time.”

  *

  *

  *

  “Minalan, when your people arrived from the Void, so many years ago, the humani were allowed to settle here partially because they were novel in that they did not practice magic in any serious way,” Lilastien began, after two human servants brought us luncheon.

  “Not that the original humani weren’t advanced, in their way. Your tekka was impressive, and even dangerous, but entirely unlike our civilization. And you asked very politely,” she added, pleased. “ My people did not see your ancestors as much of a threat, at least not most of them. And other kindreds... well, they depended upon our judgement.

  “So when a few generations passed and your folk began manifesting rajira , we were surprised at how quickly the Talent popped up on Perwyn. We were even more surprised when the first of the collective subconscious entities your people summoned appeared. The first of those you call the gods. I was called in,” she remembered, fondly. “I was doing my residency at the New Leiden Medical Center on the big island when the first reports were made.”

  “The first gods?” I offered.

  “The first... manifestations ,” she corrected. “It is unclear whether or not they were actual gods, as we understand them, but they were the first times that entities from the humani subconscious manifested corporeally.” She got a distant look in her eye as she thought back to memories forged centuries before.

  “There were two the first six months: an old man in a red suit and a pointed-eared warrior in a black cloak who attacked a criminal gang. They were dismissed as costumes or pranks, at first, but some of their abilities could not be explained away by mere imagination. They were still kept quiet, to the public in Perwyn, but they attracted our attention.

  “After the fat man and the dark knight, these manifestations started appearing regularly in extreme situations: three instances of a woman with bird’s wings rescuing people in danger. Anthropomorphic animals doing the impossible. A short warrior with whiskers and a big nose, wearing a winged helm, appeared in a sea-side resort and battled an archaic tattooed mariner, disfigured by his long years at sea.”

  “That sounds... ominous...”

  “It wasn’t as deadly as it sounds,” she assured. “They confined their combat largely to each other. That was a particularly interesting case,” she smiled fondly. “I investigated, and traced the manifestations back to an argument between two young human boys at the resort – both with the first stirrings of their nascent first-generation rajira – who were trying to settle which cultural character would prevail in the contest: the warrior with his potion of strength, or the mariner with his rations of spinach.

  “Spinach?” I snorted.

  “Your ancestors had their reasons,” she reproved. “Spinach is an excellent source of dietary fiber and essential vitamins for growth!”

  “I’d still take the magical potion of strength,” I shrugged.

  “Regardless of the outcome of the combat,” she continued, sternly, “the event was widely documented, and the first overt sign that there was something... odd about humanity.”

  “ That was your first sign?” I asked in disbelief. She ignored me. The wisdom of the Sorceress of Sartha Wood is legendary.

  “That convinced us we needed to do something about the emergence of rajira in humanity,” she corrected. “That’s why we embarked on a ten-year program to adapt the rudiments of Alkan songspells into something simple enough for the humani mind to grasp. We adapted many of the basic phrases and tunes into glyphs, you being perversely addicted to literacy.”

  “The Perada,” I nodded.

  “The Perwyn Institute Rules for Abstract Directive Action ,” she corrected. “PIRADA is the acronym, in that dialect of Perwynese.”

  “’Abstract Directive Action?’”

  “That’s what your ancestors insisted on calling magic, when they first encountered it among their own people,” she recalled with a snort. “They were doing their best to apply the language of science to a realm where their science had few answers. The Perwyn Institute was tasked with investigating the manifestations and their source, and that lead to the recognition that Callidore’s soil had begun to change humanity. The world was making it more magically-sensitive with every passing generation. And that was becoming disruptive to human society, so we had to study the matter.

  “After a few years we came up with twenty basic rules to help the human mind affected by rajira to understand and contend with their
powers. Hardly comprehensive, but it let them get used to the idea that reality wasn’t quite as normal for them as for others.”

  “That must have been a shock,” I snorted, imagining a non-magical society realizing it was raising wizards in their midst.”

  “It was,” she agreed. “In hundreds of ways. We did a decade’s worth of research on ‘abstract directive action’ in humanity, before releasing that paper. They couldn’t bring themselves to just call it ‘magic’, though they had the cultural foundation from your homeworld they could have adopted, for simplicity’s sake. You can still find the suffix ‘-ada’ in many contemporary documents on magic from Perwyn, from what I understand.

  “But the gods...”

  “Yes, the gods... or the ‘collective corporeal manifestation of abstract independent entities’,” she said, smiling wryly. “Early on they were more of a nuisance than real powers. We were much more concerned with the rise of the human magi, who had taken the PIRADA and exceeded our expectations.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, confused.

  “We gave you the Perada and the other introductions to magic to aid you in your understanding of the subject,” she explained. “We never expected those early magi to develop them so quickly into the sophisticated forms they did. It took everyone by surprise. Compared to those early magi, the pale images of children’s characters and cultural heroes were mere distractions. The early magi were doing things with the limited tools we’d given them that we’d never anticipated.”

  “A lute only has eight courses, but they still manage to come up with new songs,” I pointed out.

  “Precisely!” the old Alkan grinned. “That’s what I love about studying your species, your endless adaptability. The early magi were experimenting and causing all sorts of problems, so the gods, such as they were, weren’t important... then . When the office of Archmage was established after the coup, and magic was institutionalized, a lot of things happened,” she said, her expression changing, like a cloud passing over the sun. “We weren’t exactly paying attention to all of their little manifestations.