Salamander

by David D. Friedman

  Salamander

  by

  David Friedman

  Cover illustration a quilt by Fi Bowman, artist,

  http://www.fibowman.com

  ©David D. Friedman 2011

  To the late Patri Pugliese

  My consultant on cleverness and much else.

  Chapter 1

  He relaxed, closed his eyes, let his mind wander out. Behind him the dying embers of his fireplace, beyond it the fires in neighboring houses. At his right, just the other side of the wall, the little furnace, at its heart a single, impossibly brilliant, point of light. He pulled shadow over it until it vanished.

  Farther out, the near edge of the vast sphere of woven fire that held the College, half its height above ground, half below. He melted into it, fitting himself to the dancing flames, through.

  A classroom, at its head a magister, young for his robes.

  …

  Magister Coelus scanned faces as he always did at the start, searching for gold. Not for power so much as perception, control. Intelligence. The stragglers took their seats. A boy at the back caught his attention, his glow an odd pattern of woven flame. It seemed brighter, more intense than the others. Power certainly. And a lot of it. The boy looked up at the magister; the light vanished. Not a boy but a girl, with a shy face neither pretty nor ugly.

  He wondered if she had blocked him out of training or talent. No girl student yet in the four years since he and Maridon had persuaded the College of modern scholarship’s relevance to their admission policy had shown more than average ability. If the girl turned out to be not merely a fire mage but a prodigy as well, it would shake up the greybeards—and a good thing too.

  Seated now, the students watched him intently; time to begin.

  "Let us start by listing that which everyone knows about magery.

  "Mages have magic; common folk do not.

  "What makes a truly great mage is power, the ability to set a forest on fire or freeze a lake.

  "Mages train, as apprentices with one master or students with many, in order to learn to increase their power.

  "The power of mages comes from the elementals—salamanders for fire, sylphs for air, and the rest. Elementals know mages by their names. Hence, giving a child the name of a past mage gives him easier access to that mage's elemental.

  "Every one of the facts I have just listed is false. The first step to wisdom is not learning but unlearning."

  Coelus looked up from his notes into silence, held it for a long moment, continued.

  "First, and most important, magic is not limited to mages. Human beings without magic, if they exist, are far rarer than humans beings with magic. Modern research suggests that magic is not even limited to human beings. Many, perhaps all, living creatures have some portion of magic used in some way.

  "All of you know people who are not mages but use magic. The cook at the inn, whose food tastes better than anyone else's. The lucky hunter. The farmer with a green thumb. It once was thought that the success of ordinary people in ordinary tasks depended only on mundane skills. But this is not so, as scholars have now proved beyond dispute. Nearly everyone has magic and very nearly everyone uses it, mostly as an additional aid in their ordinary business.”

  If possible, the room became more silent still. Coelus looked up at faces blank, some obviously shocked. Spoke into the silence:

  "This has been suspected for a long time and was proved by experiment more than a decade ago. It is not a secret of mages. Mages have little need to keep secrets, considering how unwilling people are to believe the truth when it is told to them.

  “Some of you are now wondering why you are here. If your parents' laundry maid—the one who always gets the clothes to come out brighter than anyone else—would do as well, why not send her? Why are you more suited to be mages than she is?"

  Again he stopped, to let them think and tension build.

  "The answer is not that you have magic and she does not, but that you have more than she—enough to be used for more than washing shirts. That is half the difference between mages and other folk, the half that got you sent here. The other half, how to use that power, is what you are here to learn.

  "You will start learning it very soon, but you have more to unlearn first. I have just told you that one part of what makes a mage is having more power. How, then, is the power of great mages false?

  "Even the greatest mages have very little power. You have all heard stories of how a fire mage waved his hand and set a forest ablaze. None of them are true. If a fire mage wants to set a forest ablaze, he must do it the same way anyone else does—with a lot of kindling. Durilil, one of our founders, one of the most powerful fire mages that ever lived, is reliably reported to have been able to set a hearth fire of plain logs ablaze. A forest holds many more logs than a hearth.

  "What makes a great mage is not his power but the skill with which he uses it. Consider a healer—yes, within these walls, healers are mages. No mage has enough power to go through the whole body of a patient and set everything aright, at least not if the patient is anything bigger than a mouse. What a skilled healer does is to find the one crucial fault and heal that, then let the rest fall into place by its own nature. The more skill a mage has, the less power he uses—needs—to accomplish his task. That is what you are here to learn.

  "We cannot teach you to increase your power. You are here to increase your skill. We can increase your power no more than we can teach you to increase your height. It is possible, although difficult and dangerous, to obtain the use of more power by pooling with another mage. There are also potions to let you draw down your power today at a cost tomorrow, although I do not advise you to use them. The pool itself we cannot increase."

  Coelus fell silent, and looked out over his audience. To start backwards, with all they knew that wasn't true, always worked. Everyone in the class was now wide awake and watching him. Now it was their turn. "Questions?"

  A long silence before a hand went up. "How can people use the elements for magic in daily life? Cooking has something to do with fire and farming with earth, but hunting? What is the element for a tailor?"

  Coelus waited a moment to be sure the student had finished before responding.

  "There is no element for a tailor or a hunter. There is no element for cooking, as far as I know, and I have my doubts that a good farmer is simply an untrained earth mage. Nor is there an element for healing. Yet I have told you that a healer is a sort of mage. There is no element for weaving. Yet the sphere of woven fire that holds this College safe from the world, and the world safe from the College, was the work of two mages, and only one was a fire mage.

  "The belief that all magic is tied to one of the four elements is both true and false. All magic is indeed earth, air, fire and water, in many combinations. But all magic can equally well be seen as hot, cold, wet and dry, or woven, shaped, refined and tempered. Hot magic may be combined of air and fire, but equally fire magic is combined of hot and dry."

  The students looked puzzled at the paradox, the central paradox of magical theory—except for the girl in back, who watched only with careful attentiveness. Coelus wondered if she had failed to follow—which would be a pity—or if she already knew. Some students came to the College already apprenticed and at least a few witches were technically competent in magery. If most were not, that was in part the fault of the College. If the girl had not come with an adequate understanding, at least she could leave with one.

  "Explaining how this can be and the simpler implications will take me most of two months, starting here first period tomorrow. For now, the best I can offer is metaphor."

  He turned to the broad slate that occupied most of the front wall of the lecture hall, chalk in hand. "Imagine this
slate is a map. A is where you are starting. B is where you want to go to."

  He drew an arrow pointing up, under it an N for north, a rough distance scale in miles, turned back to the class. "How do you get there?"

  The same student who had asked the question raised his hand; Coelus nodded to him to speak.

  "Go about six miles east, then two north."

  "Yes. Can someone give me another answer?"

  No one spoke. Coelus looked at the girl in back; in a moment she raised her hand, a bit reluctantly. "A little less than six miles North-east, almost three miles south-east."

  "Yes."

  He turned back to the board, drew in her answer as two arrows, turned back to the class. "Which is true? Is point B east and north from point A?"

  He held their eyes for a moment, turned back to the board, waved his hand—what they would expect of a mage. The horizontal grid, white on the black slate, appeared suddenly. "Or is it north-east and south-east from point A?"

  He stepped to the slate, caught the grid at its bottom edge and swung it up—it pivoted on the lower left corner until its lines lay along what had been the diagonal. "Class dismissed."

  * * *

  “How does the new class look?”

  Maridon glanced up from the papers. “Forty-nine new students, six women. Mostly children of minor nobles, tradesmen, small landowners, but there are two farmers’ sons Dag searched out and sent here. Three are the children of mages, so probably half-trained or half mistrained already. Also the daughter of Duke Morgen, who may be a problem. Less power than most, but it might be prudent not to say so.”

  Coelus shook his head. “And then when she can’t do things… . I suppose there’s the usual nonsense with names?”

  Maridon nodded. “At least there’s only one each of Durilil, Georgias, and Helmin. Remember year before last? Three Durilils and two Gilbers. Good thing most people don’t plan on their children being mages, or we would be down to four or five names for the whole class. Far as I can see there’s no truth to it—damn superstition.”

  “No truth at all. I went through the school records for the past twenty years and just finished up last week. A kid named Durilil is no more likely to end up a fire mage, or Gilber earth, than anyone else. And it’s getting worse. Mage names are much more common than they were twenty years ago. Why won’t people believe us when we tell them it doesn’t work?”

  Maridon contemplated, not for the first time, the limits of his colleague’s formidable intelligence. He might be the best theorist in the college, but understanding people was another matter. “They don’t believe us because they think we are trying to keep down the competition. Too many talented mages and what would become of us?”

  “There can’t be too many,” Coelus protested. “Just think of all we could do if there were five or ten times as many mages. We could put out forest fires before they spread, maybe halt plagues. That’s why …”

  “That’s why you talked Dag into spending his free year seeking out talent in unexpected places. We may know that, but who else does? People believe what they want to believe.

  “Oh well. Perhaps in fifty years half the newborn boys in the kingdom will be named Coelus!”

  Coelus shook his head. “Not even one in a thousand. If I am very lucky, fifty years from now a handful in the College will remember my work. Nobody else. Theory doesn’t impress ordinary people. They want results, nice showy results. If Durilil had come back with the Salamander on a chain instead of never coming back at all, half the class would be named after him, not just one or two. And we’ve never had a student named after Olver.

  “Let me have a look at the admission papers.”

  The two fell silent for a few minutes while Coelus leafed through the stack. At last he looked back up. "That's very interesting.”

  “What? I didn’t see anything special about any of them.”

  “That’s what’s interesting. According to Hal we have three or four moderately strong students—one of them named Helmin, and one a find of Dag’s—plus a bunch with enough power to be worth training but not much more, and a few I’m not sure we should have taken. That’s what he saw. But I was watching the class before my first lecture and it isn’t what I saw.”

  The other mage looked at him curiously, waited.

  “I’ll leave you to see for yourself. Let me know when you’ve spotted him. Or not.”

  Maridon noticed the suppressed smile—Coelus was not nearly as subtle as he thought he was—made his own deduction, said nothing.

  Chapter 2

  The lecturer droned to a halt, put the chalk down, and turned to the class. "I hope that is clear. If not, make sure it is by tomorrow; some of this will be used in what we do then. If your own notes are not sufficient, the library has a list of written texts that cover the same material."

  He looked them over a moment and then, satisfied, turned and left the room.

  Mari looked down at her tablets, pale yellow wax in ebony, the outside panels inlaid with a pattern in gold wire. Other students were jotting final notes in theirs, so she used her stylus to add, in her untidy script, two more notes on wedding garb for a (hypothetical) future wedding.

  Her notes were not likely to make the lecture any more understandable, nor, she suspected, would the texts in the library. The only one she had tried to read so far might have been written in archaic Dorayan for all the sense she could make of it. What she needed was a helpful human being to explain things for her.

  One or two of the younger magisters might be possibilities, but probably not this year; that could wait until her first individual tutorial. With ten men to every woman, not to mention her natural advantages, getting one of the male students to help her would be easy enough. But on the whole she preferred to keep her alternatives open. Might as well keep them all hoping.

  The answer was obvious and sitting two chairs away. The girl had no clothes sense and no particular looks, but she seemed pleasant enough if a little shy, and she obviously understood the lecture better than anyone else in the room. She had been transparently puzzled when the other students—including, once, Mari—were unable to answer the magister's questions. She answered those put to her immediately, clearly, and apparently correctly. By the second half of the class the lecturer had fallen into a pattern of putting a question to some other student and then, lacking a satisfactory response, asking Ellen.

  There was a clatter and rumble of scraping as the students got up from their chairs. Mari decided to approach the girl directly. She made her way to the back of the room against the exiting flow of pupils where Ellen was still putting away her things. "You seemed to understand all of that much better than I did; would you be willing to join me at lunch and try to explain it?"

  Ellen looked up at Mari, smiled. "Of course. At the noon bell?"

  Mari decided not to suggest the cookshop to meet. The other girl was wearing no jewelry and her clothes gave no sign of rank or wealth. If she was too poor to want to buy lunch when it was free in the college refectory the suggestion would embarrass her; offering to buy it for her might make matters worse. In the setting of the College the girl was her equal—at least her equal—and it was up to Mari to remember that. "At the noon bell then," Mari said.

  * * *

  Mari waited until the two were seated at one of the smaller tables and Ellen had cut a slice from her sausage before putting her first question. "Are we training to be witches or mages? I can't tell."

  Ellen considered for a moment. "We are training to use magic. Women who use magic are commonly called witches. Several of the magisters here think they ought to be called mages, that what they do is no different from what men who use magic do."

  "Women do different sorts of magic. Everyone knows that. Weaving magic and healing magic and things like that. Men are fire mages and earth mages and … ."

  Ellen shook her head. "Everyone knows it. But it isn't true. At least, not completely true."

  "How can it be bo
th true and not true? I don't understand."

  "That was part of what Magister Bertram was trying to explain,” Ellen said. “Most weaving mages are women and most fire mages are men, but that doesn't mean a man can’t have a talent for weaving or a woman for fire."

  She looked around the refectory. It was getting crowded, but so far nobody had joined them at their table. "Which are taller, men or women?"

  Mari gave her a puzzled look. "Men, of course. Jon over there is taller than I am, and even Edwin is taller than you are."

  "But you are taller than Edwin. So men are not taller than women. Not always."

  "And men are better at fire magic, but not always?"

  Ellen nodded.

  Mari responded: "Well, of course lots of women are taller than short men. But I have never heard of a woman who was a fire mage. Not one."

  Ellen thought a moment before answering. "Mages have to be trained. At best, an untrained mage cannot do much with his power. At worst, an untrained fire mage either kills himself by accident—that's what usually happens—or burns down a house or barn and kills someone else, and then, very likely, someone kills him. A boy who starts showing the talent is likely to be recognized before he does any serious damage and, with luck, sent for training. A girl … . Everyone knows girls can't be fire mages."

  "That's scary. But if women are hardly ever fire mages, and the ones that do get killed, how do Coelus and Bertram know witches can do fire magic? How do you know?"

  "I think Coelus figured it out from basic magical theory, but I'm not sure.” Ellen gave the other girl a long, considering look. "How good are you at keeping secrets?"

  "Quite. My brother tells me … things. I never tell our parents." She stopped.

  "Can you keep a secret for me too?"

  Mari nodded.

  Ellen turned in her seat, holding her hand, palm up, where her body blocked it from the rest of the room. For a moment her hand cupped a flame. "That's how I know."