Wizard (The Key to Magic)

by H. Jonas Rhynedahll

  What Old Mar had said was quite true. All of the spells that he used were outgrowths of his examination of the everyday magic of the natural world. Driven by the needs of the moment, he had adapted preexisting modulations without bothering to attempt the organized structure prescribed in the first text. While in general terms he did use objects as reservoirs for his enchantments, he controlled all of his spells at a basic flux level rather than through a Binding and a Key. Before the fall of Mhajhkaei, during his original efforts to adapt the spells of his sand raft to make the skyships fly, he had spent some time trying to work out how to create those latter two elements, but events had interrupted that effort and he had never resumed it.

  Now, he was in a world of real magic and real spells and his slapdash magic almost certainly would prove -- perhaps already had proven -- inferior.

  He delved the chair.

  Though skeins of flux extended beyond its physical boundaries, all of the modulations that created the forces confining him were centered in the body of the chair. In particular, the not-steel piping of the frame concealed beneath the leather-like white covering appeared to enclose the bulk of the sound-colors. Logically, the frame should be considered the reservoir matrix or Vessel.

  Of course, this simple discovery only allowed him to concentrate his focus as he attempted to identify the Binding. According to the text, Bindings should be simple, regular, and strong. Did that mean that it would be a single flux modulation?

  He examined the modulations again. As far as he could tell, there were seven distinct groupings, each containing three to nine modulations.

  Realizing that it might be productive to think of the Binding as a lock -- the opening of locks being a task in which he had quite a bit of expertise, though of late little practical experience -- he began to search for a modulation formed with the same fundamental characteristics as a physical lock: it must seal or confine the other modulations, it must be strong and compact, and it must permit interaction with the Key.

  After a bit, he noticed that one particular modulation, an argumentative peach, spread through the entire mass of the spell and indeed seemed intertwined with each of the other modulations. Interactions existed between the remaining modulations, but no other had the same degree of association.

  Presuming that sound-color to be the Binding, how must he construct its matching Key?

  The first text had said that a Key was an action which generated a disarrangement in the background ether. While the text had not explained beyond a short list of specific examples -- which he had taken to include almost any physical act -- he thought that this action, at least in the case of the spell that confined him, would not be something so commonplace that it could be triggered by chance or guessed by an astute magician. Further, he thought that it would prove burdensome for this Key to be some lengthy and complex chain of movements or words. For practical purposes, it would have to be something short, but out of the ordinary.

  Any sort of physical experimentation to divine the Key was impossible. He could twitch a finger, but little more than that. However, he had a good bit of knowledge of how speech and movements generated sound-colors and could handily recreate them through mental effort alone. Examining the folds and vibrations in the Binding modulation, he methodically began to waft limited segments of flux in its direction.

  It took a considerable subjective time but eventually he derived a set of five sound-colors that individually generated demonstrative changes in the chair Binding. Anxious to be free, he swiftly assembled these into a compact chain and launched the structure at the chair's Binding.

  Light flared and he felt a jolt that made his muscles seize, causing him to instantly disperse his clearly incorrect Key.

  After a moment's pause, he studied the Binding again, made a slight adjustment to one of the flux segments of his Key, and then nudged it into contact again, watching with intense concentration as the modulations merged without clashing.

  Instantly, the restraining forces emanating from the chair vanished.

  FOUR

  The leg irons and manacles, their metalwork as elegant and precise as any jewelry made during the late Empire, were also as ethereally dead as the Brotherhood's steel cubes. Magic would not free him of those, but each of the brightly polished restraints had mechanical latches with small, irregularly shaped keyholes. Unfortunately, there was nothing within his view that he could use as a lock pick.

  Enchanting his brigandine, he rose from the chair and rotated about, seeking the door that he thought must be behind him. To his considerable surprise, he found the faces of the walls to his rear to be as featureless as those that he had been able to see. Curious, he tweaked the strength of his spells and coasted toward the wall on his left. The aggregating resistance of slowed time kept him from getting near enough to touch it, but he did manage to make it to within two armlengths before the ethereal feedback brought him to a halt.

  Glossy and smooth, the evenly colored surface defied delving and though he could not be sure he thought that it was not made of a common material such as wood, metal, or stone. Considering its seamless nature, it seemed likely that magic had been used in its construction, but it was now as impervious to the ether as were his chains. Once again, his spells were useless.

  He turned about and considered his captors. Without a doubt, they must have a means to enter and exit the cell, so a very well hidden door must exist. With a modest effort, he worked his way around, towing his magical lamp, and studied the four walls for any indication of such -- a hairline crack, a slight irregularity, or a telltale discoloration left by passing hands.

  He found nothing. As far as he could tell by sight alone, the texture, color, and composition of the material was consistent. There were no pockmarks, blemishes, joints, or scratches. With corners rounded inward and an identical ceiling and floor, the cell appeared to have been fashioned in a single, continuous piece.

  But this made no sense.

  Unless ... his captors had come into the room by a spell that allowed them to pass through solid walls!

  Guessing that the questioner would be the most likely possessor of such a powerful spell, Mar drove back across the cell to examine his gaoler.

  On the likely slim chance that the key to his chains might be hanging from a ring in plain view, Mar first orbited around the ... his newly acquired language told him that the man was a Compliance Officer -- for a visual inspection. As expected, he saw none. The Compliance Officer's ... Investigative Section -- another designation in this new foreign tongue -- standard issue yellow trousers had no pockets, but did have a small, hard leather pouch about the size of a coin purse attached to the left side of his belt.

  Shifting around, Mar used the fingers of both hands, cumbersome manacles clanking in an annoying way, to open the pouch. The catch was a simple metal snap, but, still for the most part under the influence of normal time, the material had the stiffness of a thick copper sheet and it took him several subjective moments to force the flap up out of the way. In the process, sparkles of droning-cerulean burst and faded from the leather, but these had no obvious ill effect and he dismissed them.

  He grinned when he saw the flat gray shine of a well-used steel key rather than the luster of silver or gold coin in the purse. Digging the key out proved a tedious process, but once it was completely in his grip, the apparent weight of it -- originally something in the neighborhood of an anvil -- dropped to normal and he quickly freed himself of both leg irons and manacles. When released, these did not fall to the floor but rather hovered in place, shifted back into the standard flow of time. He started to drop the key as well, but changed his mind and pocketed it against possible future need.

  Now, how did these gaolers come and go?

  Though it did possess a weak taint of magic, the Compliance Officer's livery exhibited only the intrinsic sound-colors of its fabric. The man bore no obvious weapon or other equipment, only three pieces of jewelry. These, a silver pendant and a seg
mented bracelet on each arm, blazed with flux.

  The pendant, ornate, set with five rubies, and worth, in Mar's estimation, at least nine hundred thalars in any back alley in Khalar, hung from a simple, finely-linked gold chain looped around the man's neck. The large bauble had an aged feel and Mar counted more than a dozen spells bound to it. Their construction straightforward and uncomplicated, he had no trouble delving the modulations. All had a passive presence in the ether and his sense was that the pendant served only a defensive purpose.

  In contrast, the fingerlength-wide bracelets had the polished look of fine tool steel and were hardly thicker than a sheet of vellum. Neither had filigree, gems, or other decoration, only the incised triangle groove that separated the segments, four on the left and five on the right. The number of spells in each corresponded to the number of segments and as far as he could tell each spell was bound to a specific segment. Sharing the same convoluted construction as those of the chair, these modulations likewise could not be delved.

  A quick visual poll established that each of the other yellow liveried guards wore bracelets identical to the Compliance Officer's. The medic also had a bracelet, though hers had three yellow gemstones in place of segments.

  The bracelets were not decoration, then, but standard equipment. His way out of the cell had to be through one of the nine spells.

  The bracelet clasps were not hidden and the pose of Compliance Officer's body did not obstruct access to them. After a bit of effort, Mar had a bracelet in each hand. As soon as he had them loose, the rigid, formed shape of each bracelet relaxed, hinging along the grooves, and he flattened the bracelets on his palms. It seemed unlikely that more than one of the possible nine choices would be a transportation spell. Not knowing what uproar he might activate with the unknown spells, cycling through them in a methodical manner had to be a last resort. He would have to try to figure out which segment to key to escape the cell and needed to be fairly confident in his choice.

  What sort of magic could move a man through space?

  Wizardry was the only answer that his deficient knowledge could suggest. Though Whinseschlos had repudiated the claim, the ancient wizard had indicated that practitioners of wizardry were known as masters of time and space. Seeking any whiff of undertime, Mar examined the spells.

  The sound-colors varied in intensity and hue and most were strange to him, but the bracelet in his left hand definitely exuded a sense of a teal, though spiteful rather than whistling, and this seemed concentrated in the third segment. He pocketed the second bracelet and considered the options. The bracelets were designed for convenience and utility and the Key therefore should not be complex. Would it be a word or a gesture? A spoken word might be inconvenient under a number of circumstances and a basic gesture might be the most straightforward Key. The segments were distinct in and of themselves and it made no sense that he could see to have a separately defined gesture for each. Following a thought, he held the bracelet up so that his lamp reflected off the flat surfaces at an oblique angle and found that a slight sheen of fingerprint impressions smudged each segment. Of course, the spells were keyed by a press or tap!

  Knowing nothing could be gained by indecision, he pressed his thumb down firmly on the cool metal of the third segment.

  Focused on the ether, he watched as flux surged from the bracelet and felt the uncomfortable sucking clutch of undertime for an instant, but then saw the intervention of another more powerful spell that scattered the modulations of the first without generating an ethereal reaction. This new spell had not been apparent prior to the casting of the travel spell and now that the latter had failed, he could no longer detect the blocking spell's presence.

  It took seven presses of the third segment before he divined the Key to the blocking spell, a full two minutes to assemble the intricate flux modulation, and then but a second to apply it. At his next press on the bracelet, in less time than it took to blink, he stopped being in the cell and was instead in a brightly lit space.

  The first thing that he noticed about his new surroundings was that he was no longer under the effect of The Knife Fighter's Dirge. His passage through the periphery of undertime had stripped the spell away.

  A man in livery identical to Mar's just escaped captors had been passing by on the other side of a thin, insubstantial, and half-height wall. With a flinch of shock, he jerked to a stop and yelled, "Don't move!"

  As the man grabbed toward his belt as if for a weapon, Mar slammed a wave of air across him.

  The surge smashed the low partition, carried it away into the armsman, and then drove both through another such partition. The armsman's bellow and the crash of the tumbling partitions and swept up furniture swung every one of the dozens of heads in sight towards Mar. Within no more than two seconds, a great and rapid pealing of a bell rang through the vast open room and instantly the startled armsmen began to charge along the numerous aisles to close with Mar.

  Shoving the Compliance Officer's bracelet in his pocket with its twin, he located the single exit and hurtled toward it, clearing his path with walls of wind and fire and laying about with lashes of the same to dissuade those trying to bar his way. Flux lances of all sorts arced through the ether, homing on his chest, but he deflected, dispersed, or simply dodged all. As he gained the exit and its forming blockade of armsmen, he put out the overhead lamps, dropped to a floor covered completely in a continuous rug, and scuttled between two of the blinded, confounded, and angrily yelling armsmen. The heavy steel door had already slammed shut, but the lock and the metal were amenable to enchantment and he had it open and was through it and into the corridor beyond before the first shouts rang out about checking the door.

  The wide corridor was empty but spells and guards swarmed the lobby into which it opened. Before he took a full step, he cast a wave of flux that plunged the area in darkness and then started ripping apart the Vessels of the other spells at random. Many of the resulting bursts of violated flux flared into explosions of ethereal and natural fire, hurling buffeting concussions through the confined space. A blaze sprang up in the wall on the other side of the lobby, vomiting smoke and frenetic red strobes.

  Shouts and the shape of shadows running through the flashing rays pinpointed the guards and made them inconsequential. Staying low, he followed the right hand wall around to a set of smooth metal doors, pausing only once to allow a stumbling armsman to blunder by. As he examined the doors by touch, seeking either a physical or magical lock, he briefly grasped a raised part of the frame on the right side. This caused the doors to part silently to emit a shaft of white light that knifed through the swirling smoke. Hoping the confusion was severe enough to leave him undetected, he slipped into the small room beyond. After a moment the doors slid together again on their own, sealing out the uproar.

  He had hoped for a way out, but a quick spin about did not discover another door. Having the same unadorned walls as the rest of the place, he did not think this a garderobe -- at least, there was no commode that he could detect. It was quite empty, in fact, and thus also hardly seemed to be a cupboard.

  Feeling exposed should one of the guards think to search the tiny room, he shifted over to the right and tucked himself in the near corner. In the process, his shoulder brushed the short wall between the corner and the edge of the door.

  With the single chime of a soft tone, bright blue symbols came into being on the unmarked surface of the narrow strip. Startled, he stepped back as the symbols began to change rapidly and he felt a sudden surge of upward movement as the floor pressed against the bottom of his feet. After a belated moment, perhaps prompted by knowledge impressed by the female medic's spell, he kenned the symbols to be numbers that were approaching zero from a deficit. The changing symbols did not stop at zero, however, but continued to increment and slowed only as the upward acceleration faded, finally freezing to indicate 42.

  When the doors slid apart, he charged through.

  And struck a yellow liveried woman standing
in wait just inside the corridor beyond. Carrying a stack of multi-colored papers, his unintended victim went arse over pate and, bellowing but retaining her burden, crashed to the floor. He cut left, vaulted over the sprawled and now energetically shouting woman's kicking legs, and ran for all that he was worth.

  Other doorways pierced the corridor, and other people were about, but the ceiling-high window at the end of the corridor snared his eye and he sprinted for it. Enchanting a large pot against the near wall that held a sickly looking plant, he swept it us as he raced along. He sent this missile barreling ahead of him as a battering ram and it obligingly smashed out panes and metal framework. With careless abandon, he flung himself out through the jagged hole it had created into the open night.

  The great space into which he plummeted was a bit of a surprise -- he had hoped for a drop of no more than a few manheight -- but he swiftly cast enchantments to bear himself up above a vast landscape lit like a starfield by thousands of bright, dazzling lamps. As he fluttered in fits and spurts, steadily loosing altitude, above what he gradually came to recognize as a grand metropolis, he became genuinely awed by the city's horizon reaching size and the droning ethereal roar of its ubiquitous magic. This city was a hundred times larger than Mhajhkaei and shook the ether with a conglomeration of flux whose tremendous scope he could scarcely grasp. For several moments, he simply let the wondrous and magnificent sight fill his eyes and thoughts.

  With the sounds of a whetted dagger plunging into flesh, steel-hearted darts of chilly, grinding-crimson sliced the air within fingerlengths of his head, slashing across his path and bringing him up short with a guttural yell.

  FIVE

  Throwing together a shroud of crude lisping-mauve, he began to batter the missiles aside. A few got through his defense, ripping by too fast to allow him to feel alarmed at their passage, and a number burst in showers of agonized flux and glowing sparks.