Nightlord: Sunset

by Garon Whited

  Jon also went over a lot of wizarding with me—the magical end of things. He showed me how to get rid of warts, cure a cold, and make crops favor the idea of growing bigger. He taught me to see far places in a bowl of water, a mirror, or a crystal. He instructed me on how to read signs and omens in a handful of bones, to listen to the life of the world in the wind, and some of the language used by the gods in the creation of the world—what he knew of it, anyway.

  One of the things I found most interesting was making a Mental Note. Quite literally, it was like having a private study inside my own head. He taught me to “go inside” and find my “inner room.” There I could sit at the desk, lounge on the couch, read, write, and do whatever else I fancied. The things I read in there were rather disjointed—like reading a book in a dream—unless I had gone in and written it there. It was handy for making notes about things, and I immediately started updating my journal there. Here. In the study.

  We also went over magical theory and practical applications, but mainly over the why and the how of magic, not the step-by-step engineering of spells.

  “That’s for magicians,” Jon said; the scorn in his voice was plain. “They’re nothing but technicians for something that is Art. You can’t put Art into a classroom to memorize. You have to live and breathe it.”

  One evening, sitting on a rooftop, watching the nighttime glitter and flow of life in the city, I reflected I certainly eat and drink it, which isn’t quite the same as living and breathing it.

  Later, in the study, I also asked Jon about his life as a wizard. I caught him after a good meal and a pipe, so he was more talkative about his personal life than usual.

  He knocked out the bowl of the pipe and scraped it a bit, filled it again, lit it, puffed, thought.

  “I can’t say I’m so different,” he said, finally. “I’d like t’think I am, sure, but I don’t know. Looking back, I’m a lot like all the rest—just older and with steady work.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Take yourself, for example,” he said, pointing at me with his pipe. “You travel all the time, going from place to place, working spells for whatever the traffic will bear. Never settling for long because nobody really trusts a—a wizard. There’s no telling what sort of crap is going to come boiling out of a wizard’s shack. Or, at least, that’s what the bloody-minded peasants think.

  “Of course, the traveling wizards will come through and undercut your prices; they’ll resent you, too, for taking business out of the town for them.” He settled sullenly back in his chair and dropped his eyes to his smoldering pipe. “We don’t get along at the best of times; we’re too conscious of keeping our own reputation as high as possible to really cooperate. I’ve never known a wizard to share a spell with anyone else unless he got at least as good a spell in return. I hear that may be changing a little, but I don’t get out much anymore. That’s the way things were fifty years ago, anyway!

  “And then there’s the local priest,” he added, almost savagely. “He’ll have the peasants muttering and cursing you under their breath in a fortnight. Thanks to him, you get blamed for every sick sheep—after all, some peasant will be paying you to cure it. You hexed it to make him hire you!” The bitterness in his voice was plain. “They’ll accuse you of everything from well-poisoning to stillbirths without any care for whether or not it would actually profit you!

  “Then there’s the idea that you’ll fall in love with some local girl—forget it! She may like you and be willing, once you get past her fear of you, she’ll never really love you, and her father will never stand for it and her other suitors will just say you bewitched her—” he broke off sharply, aged knuckles white around the bowl of the pipe. He sat silent for long moments, then puffed viciously for a while. I was quiet, just waiting.

  “I’ve talked too much tonight,” he said, finally. “Go to bed.”

  I left, but I didn’t go to bed. I did notice that there was light in the study late into the night.

  I couldn’t resist it. I looked into a bowl of water to see what he was doing. “For practice,” I told myself.

  Jon was sitting in his favorite chair, brooding. On the table in front of him, there was a mirror, laid flat, face up. Above it was the image of a girl. She was just on the pretty side of plain, but she had absolutely gorgeous eyes. It was like a three-dimensional photograph; it didn’t move, but seemed otherwise completely real.

  I noticed that Jon occasionally had to wipe at his eyes.

  I stopped looking and went for a walk, feeling like a heel for poking my nose in. I vowed to never bring it up again.

  We also went over the basics that every wizard should, at least in theory, know. A lot of that included a bunch of mental exercises—and spells to hurry the process of educating me. Normally, I hate having my mind tampered with; I get allergic to subliminal audio tapes and hypnosis videos, to say nothing of mind-altering drugs. It’s my mind, and in that respect I am an unrepentant control freak. But Jon accepted my emotional aversion with grace.

  “Good. Can’t have a wizard getting his thoughts all muddled up. So we’ll do the spells together and I’ll let you walk through my headspace first.”

  That wasn’t so bad.

  The headspace is a mental construct, an imaginary world a wizard keeps in his head, like the inner study—but larger. When a wizard wants to sit back and put his feet up and think about a problem—and he’s in the middle of a swamp—he can. Just step inside into an imaginary study and think. A wizard can also file good ideas and spells in his headspace; just work it out in your imaginary study or laboratory, then put it in a box. Be sure to label the box, or finding it could be a problem.

  Now, to expand upon a concept…

  Suppose you need more room? Imagine a door that leads to another, larger room. Want to build a working model of a spell without actually making a rock explode or enchanting an entire sailing ship? Add another room to the Headspace and put it together there. Since it’s all happening in your mind, not in the real world, the power requirement is almost nonexistent, but you can see if your idea is likely to work or not.

  Maybe it’s just a really advanced form of meditation, but I find it really handy.

  Once that basic technique was down, we could go into a sort of mutual rapport in either his headspace or mine. We built a “hallway” between the headspaces with doors at either end. Jon doesn’t like unexpected visitors any more than I do, I think. But by visiting in his headspace, he could whip out notes, show me things, and replay memories for me that would have taken hours or days just to explain.

  It’s all happening at the speed of thought. We were in his headspace for at least twelve hours—or so I thought. When we came out into the “real” world again (the headspace seems as real as imagination can make it) I found it had been a little over an hour.

  My education and training as a wizard seem to be proceeding at a headlong pace. I get the feeling he’s in a hurry.

  Let’s see, what else have I been learning? Well, one of the high points: How to not be noticed.

  “No, you aren’t invisible!” Jon snapped, after I asked. “That’s a lot harder because it involves fooling the eyes, not the head! Eyes almost always see things as they are; it’s the head that doesn’t pay attention. You’ll be seen, if you do it right. You just won’t be noticed. It’s bloody useful.”

  “I’m not getting it,” I admitted.

  Jon seemed disgusted. “What color are the baron’s eyes?”

  I blinked. “Uh. I don’t know.”

  “You fought with the man for half an hour, sometimes so close you could have kissed him when your guards locked. You looked him square in the face how many times? And you don’t know what color his eyes are?”

  “Well, no.”

  Jon nodded. “The same thing happens here. You stop being noticed. People have more important things to think about, like their drink, or what the wife will say when they get home, or whether or not the sergeant knows about
that privy break.”

  “So I can’t be noticed?”

  Jon slapped a bony hand down on the table, making the candle jump. “No! You do something stupid and draw attention to yourself and people will notice. If you don’t, you’re just another face—if they remember anything about you at all. A sentry won’t let you through; he’ll demand your papers. A guard won’t let you rob the merchant. A watchman will chase you if he sees you knife someone. People will laugh at you if you take off all your clothes and dance in the street. But if you are just a face in the crowd, then no one will notice or remember you.”

  “If I do okay at blending in, then I just sort of fade away?”

  “It can learn!” he exclaimed. “Exactly!”

  “Sounds useful.”

  “It is.”

  I’m not really all that pleased at projecting a field to influence people’s minds, but it’s a lot better than reaching into someone’s brain and eating part of it. I can live with whispering “don’t notice me” instead.

  One of the other things he explained was how any magic-worker works his magic.

  “If you’re going to make magic do something, you have to tell it what you want,” he said. “You can just picture your result and muscle it, or you can see how you want your result and make your life easier.”

  “So, if I just want it to rain, I can wish real hard?”

  “You can, if you’re stupid,” he answered. My ears burned and my face grew warm as he continued, “You need to watch clouds for a while and ask them to come over, clump together, and then take a big leak all over the area.”

  “Um. Right. So the more I know about how a thing works, the better?”

  “At last, something correct! Yes. And you need the ability to make vivid mental pictures—which you must have, or you wouldn’t be here. I catch flying lines of color and make them spin around for spells; you’ll see magic in your own way and develop your own techniques to use it. How do you see magic?”

  “Well, I don’t see it so much as I feel it, usually.”

  Jon threw his hands into the air. “By all the gods! I’m glad you arrived early!”

  That was a long, long bout in the headspace. A wizard’s eyes are sensitive to magic—or the wizard is, anyway. A wizard has to be in order to work with the forces involved. Jon spent a lot of time on sensitizing me to the ebb and flow of magical force. By the time he was done, I could see magic as easily as I could see the life in a beating heart. That wasn’t entirely a good thing, especially at night; the two could blanket each other if I didn’t look carefully. Strong magic could hide life-auras, and vice versa.

  He also went over Calling. Apparently, when a wizard knows it’s time for him to go—or, at least, suspects it—he casts a spell called the Calling. Like calls to like, and a wizard much like himself will find events are conspiring to move another wizard to him. One can put a delicate spin on the Calling, too, in order to get someone not quite like oneself, or who tends toward certain qualities. But it’s draining, ongoing, and pretty much all a wizard can do magically until he succeeds or gives it up.

  As for how a wizard knows he’s going to need a replacement…

  Jon showed me the ropes.

  Well, the Ribbon.

  Imagine standing on a ribbon. It’s a couple of feet wide, and seems to be a sort of polychrome, shifting and changing in color as you watch. It’s rolling by under you, constantly, out of a formless fog ahead. The fog is silvery-grey and seems to flow into threads of different colors, which twist and braid themselves, smoke-like, into solidity just under you. Behind you, the ribbon stretches as far as you can see, crystal-clear and fixed. Ahead, it’s being woven out of the raw stuff of chaos.

  Normally, a wizard looks ahead as far as he can; that may be an hour, a day, or a week—maybe even a month or a year, if his life is very stable and quiet, very predictable and unchanging. And, sometimes, the ribbon seems to narrow a lot, a sort of pinch where everything all comes together in a pivotal moment; beyond that, things are very hazy, as it is a major, life-changing decision point. The future isn’t, and there’s no way to tell what will come until that point is reached.

  You can sometimes get a clue about the nature of the decision from the colors of the threads. Oh, yes, you can see individual threads. Some are finer than silk (and not major influences in your life) and some are thick as yarn (for big things). They all vary in color, too, and that can give you some idea of what they are, along with how they twine with other things. And when they started, of course.

  My ribbon stretched back about a day. Behind it, there was a break. Then another short stretch of ribbon. Then a break. Then another short stretch… until you went back a long way and found an unbroken line of ribbon. Ahead, my ribbon kept right on going, twisting, braiding, and weaving until it came to a definite end.

  Sometimes, dying at sunset and coming alive again in the morning is a real nuisance. Obviously, my ability to see my own personal future was sharply limited.

  The other problem was it took a while to get into a state where one could look at one’s life-ribbon. Jon managed it in about an hour, and it took me about as long even with his help. It was also tiring. Not exactly something one can do in the middle of a fight to determine whether or not sticking around is likely to be comparatively safe or not. It’s not even good for deciding whether or not to stick around for an upcoming siege; that would just be a pivotal point. I don’t see the Ribbon as being all that useful.

  Oh, and even though Jon was helping, he saw his ribbon. I saw mine. A wizard never gets to see anybody else’s ribbon, except for the thread of his own ribbon that marks another’s influence on his life. If it stops, for example, it only means they aren’t an influence anymore; it doesn’t mean they’re dead.

  Shada tells me the gata fortune-tellers do much the same thing, when they are actually trying. Their technique is different, though. It isn’t something you can learn; you have to be born with the Sight, as they put it. If you have it, you can get better at it; if you don’t have it, no amount of trying will help. For some reason, they can see someone else’s Ribbon—the ones that aren’t frauds, anyway.

  I tried to look at my ribbon again that night, after the sun was down. It also only works for people who are alive. No shadow ribbons for us dead people.

  Jon also tried to teach me the rudiments of divination by crystal ball—seeing bits of the future in the glass. Usually, they are dim, fleeting, and seldom very revealing, but they do provide clues. What you see will come to pass. Of course, if you see yourself bleeding from the neck, that may mean you cut yourself shaving—or that someone cut your throat. Sometimes it’s hard to tell through the murk. The future is never too clear.

  Sadly, Jon was disappointed in me as a diviner. I just don’t get it. It’s the future. There’s no telling what’s going to happen. Probabilities, perhaps, but the future isn’t fixed. At least, that’s how I feel about it, which Jon says is my chief difficulty. If I had more faith in Fate, I might do better. I did just fine at seeing other places now, using the crystal ball like a television screen; but the future is almost a closed door to me.

  Various other forms of divination—bibliomancy, pyromancy, tea leaves, water and bones, runestones, horoscopes—all failures. Jon despairs of ever teaching me to read the future. I stink at it.

  Shada, meanwhile, made herself at home in the baron’s manor. The Court Wizard to the baron has three main rooms all to himself: a laboratory/library, a living area, and a bedchamber. No private bath, though there were washbasins aplenty and both servants and slaves to haul water.

  I was right about my early evaluation of slaves; they are generally the province of the wealthy because they are expensive, especially skilled ones. Plus, unlike servants, the owner has to be able to afford feeding and housing for the slaves. But there are also various degrees of slavery. There is serfdom—a small step up—and indentured servitude, as well as the basic chains-and-whip property.

  Shada man
aged to make herself comfortable in what were going to be our quarters. Which meant, yes, she cleaned. Or supervised cleaning, anyway; gata wagons aren’t as drafty and dusty inside as you might think.

  I wonder if I can get a shower rigged up in my quarters? I’ll have to look into it later.

  Shada apparently spent a lot of time with her gata seer/sorceress/wizard/wise woman. None of the chalked diagrams on the floor of the workroom were touched. Heck, she barely touched the room at all, aside from closing some dusty books and putting them on shelves.

  Which brings me to another issue I’d been concerned about.

  I had learned to speak the language by—apparently—absorbing a lot of it during feeding; literacy, however, was something that made me nervous. The books I’d looked over in what I think of as the “Gate Room” in Telen hadn’t been even remotely familiar or legible to me. I don’t like the idea of having to learn a whole new alphabet, spelling, and so on. It took me a long time to get this proficient with English! That was my main stumbling block in college—learning another language was required for a degree. It took me four years to finally get enough successful credit hours in German.

  I needn’t have worried. I looked at pages and had to think a bit, but I could puzzle it out. After being told “Read that,” by Jon a couple of times, I managed to stop moving my lips, too.

  Do you have any idea how much of a relief it is to realize that you can read? I don’t think most people really ever think about it. To not be able to read is almost like being blind. It closes off not just a whole world of possibilities, but several worlds of possibility, impossibility, fantasy, and fiction.

  I’d sooner part with an eyeball than not be able to read.

  The baron is a man of harsh punishments when it comes to breaking the law. Well, at least to my “civilized” standards. Losing a hand strikes me as being a bit on the harsh side for petty theft. Then again, there isn’t a lot of petty theft in this barony; losing a hand is a pretty good deterrent. Still, there are murderers and thieves, cutthroats and cutpurses, if you will. I find the city’s watchmen are pretty decent at their job, if not quite the forensic and detective specialists I’m used to.