Zero Sight

by B. Justin Shier

  After settling in, we would meditate for an hour to eliminate intrusive thoughts.

  We were “cleaning the canvas,” as Jules put it. “Imagine a parfect black sphere,” she would say. “Move yer mind’s eye around that dark globe like a satellite. Spin it. Admire its parfection. Eliminate everything else from yer mind…”

  Sounds simple? Well try doing it for a moment. The crack of a branch, a rustling of leaves, any little thing would knock my focus. Jules didn’t seem bothered when I bungled it. She just patiently repeated the instructions, and I would try spinning my little black brain ball yet again. The absence of attention, it was an esoteric concept. How can you ignore the events transpiring around you? How can you be of the moment rather than in the moment? Hour-after-hour, day-after-day, I pondered it. I meditated so much that I dreamt little black spheres.

  Jules had smiled when I told her.

  “When you can’t recall dreamin’ em you’ll be ready, Dieter.”

  The weeks passed, and I began to improve. The absence of thought became familiar, less abstract. The nothingness arrived quicker when I called for it. I realized that Sadie had been right. Moving mana required talent, you couldn’t get around that, but mana could only be refined into something useful through an insane amount of practice. You needed to learn the basics so thoroughly that you didn’t even have to think about them. Then and only then could you step up to the greater challenge of preparing a transmutation. Nothing in my life had ever come free. I found magery was no different. I took comfort in that. It meant I could earn it.

  After our meditation sessions, Jules conducted her assignments alone. My role was simple. I just sat tight and observed. But watching wasn’t easy. When I told Jules about my Sight, she didn’t respond with Sadie’s indifference. She called my Sight auraception, and she wanted me to strengthen it. While Jules worked, my job was to will open my Sight and keep it focused for longer and longer periods of time.

  “‘Fraid pain is gainful on this one, Dieter,” she’d said. And Jules was right. Holding my Sight open was incredibly taxing. I got juicy headaches, and from time-to-time throughout the night, I would have to return to the meditation exercises Jules taught me to regain my focus. Exerting my Sight was painful, but watching Jules work was worth it.

  Jules’ craft was altogether different from the magic I’d seen so far. She didn’t use her body to conduit mana. Instead, Jules cast using circles. And she didn’t just work one magic circle at a time. Jules’ workspace consisted of three stone circles resting against one another to form a shape called a trefoil. The three circles served as the entrapment fields of the Druid style. The three circles touched at three distinct points. To the Dru, these three points represented the times of transition: sunrise, solstice, and equinox. These points served as three independent sites of transmutation. Because the three circles didn’t overlap, there was a gap formed at the center of the trefoil. This was Jules’ workspace. It served as the black canvas onto which she painted her craft.

  Jules explained that she too could cast by forming a conduit within herself, but that she avoided it like the plague. Jules disliked the instability of the human body. She argued that it always contaminated your transmutations to some degree. Thinking back to my previous experiences, I could see her point. Simply noticing Sadie’s juice box had corrupted my own simple mana extraction to terrible effect. With Jules’ method, that risk was eliminated. You could draw up mana, generate conduits, and cast spells while keeping them free from mental contamination. Better still, the Dru style let Jules focus on each component of a spell independently. After completing a component, you could just step away from it, leaving it humming like a car in neutral. Only after the three entrapment fields and three transmutation points were completely tuned did Jules began the chant that un-dammed the flows. Her style afforded tremendous control and gave Jules the confidence to practice a craft that many others remained wary of—casting on life. On the first night of my apprenticeship, Jules explained the risks:

  “Listen now, Dieter. Life’s a fragile balance. Any organism—even the simplest worm—is an incredibly complex array of movin’ parts. Squelch the flow of nutrients, compress a nerve, or disrupt the flow of air and the symphony we call life will come a crashin’ down around ya. Destroyin’ flesh is fockin’ easy. There’s a million ways to wreck a body. Just stick a wrench in here or there and you’ll be splatterin’ guts everywhere. For that same reason, any endeavor seekin' to improve a body’s function, or repair a body’s damage, is an imposin' feat.”

  “Fine,” I replied. “I’ll buy that, but how do you manage the risks?”

  “It is like fixin’ a car’s engine as it’s a speedin’ down the highway,” she mused. “There can be no half-measures. No false starts. Actions must be precise and executed with conviction. The best way is to execute all the interventions instantaneously. If ya achieve all yer objectives in one fell swoop, ya eliminate the most nasty variable of all: time.”

  I scratched my head. “Okay, but how on earth do you do everything at once?”

  “Aye, Dieter, that’s the crux. The problem lies with the human mind. It’s the limiting factor in all casting. No matter how sharp yer noggin’, ya cannot possibly moderate the manaflows, execute transmutation after transmutation, and apply the treatments fast enough in series. You’ll reach the limit of usin’ yerself as a conduit well before ya cure what ails the patient. So the answer be simple: Stop usin’ yer cluncky self as the conduit. Prepare all the components in advance. Hit ‘em with everything at once.”

  I gestured at Jules’ trefoil. “So in exchange for taking more time in the setup, you’re able to execute a spell that no one could ever achieve using only their body as a conduit?”

  “That’s along the right lines, Dieter, but yer thinkin’ be too narrow. A single complex spell? Me style uses three points of transmutation. Usin’ a trefoil, I can cast three complex spells simultaneously.”

  “Okay, I’ll give it to ya, that’s pretty cool, Jules.”

  “Of course it be pretty cool, Dieter,” she said smiling. “The Dru saved civilization, after all.”

  And so it went night after night. Meditation and observation. Learning the craft without so much as casting a spell. I wanted to try my hand at my own, but Jules would have none of it. A month passed. Another. Summer died away. We traded our thin summer robes for more substantial woolen ones. As the intensity of my studies increased, hours past like minutes. Work occupied all my time. I gave up any hope of a normal social life. I joined no clubs. I read nothing but textbooks. I knew the neighborhood squirrels better than I did my dormmates. I stopped reading the paper. Didn’t pay heed to any of the rumors. All the concerns of the world dissolved from my mind. I was a machine with one concern: I’d catch them. I’d catch them, and I’d pass them.

  At the start of October, Monique gave the go ahead for me to start casting again. Lambda threw me a Madonna party. Sadie mixed spiked Shirley Temples while Roster sang, “Like a Virgin / Casting for the very first time.” The whole group hung out into the wee hours of the morning. I had a blast. It was the first party I’d been to since I started school.

  Jules started my casting slow. I would manage setting up the circles’ extraction points as Jules worked on the more complex transmutations. To charge circles, the goal was to extract a set amount of very pure mana and trap it inside. Drawing mana from the leyline was easy for me—I had shown a natural predilection for it—the challenge was keeping the mana pure and in control.

  Purity required an empty mind. Mental images could contaminate the flow and render the mana worthless for the larger spell. The meditation techniques Jules had me practicing daily came into play here, and those sessions were paying off. Within a week, I was getting it right about half the time.

  “Good enough for a grub,” Jules said.

  Quantity was the larger problem. Each part of Jules’ spells required a set amount of mana. Like in baking, quantities were critical. Where my na
tural ability to collect mana made setting up extraction fields simple, it worked against me here. Jules said I was like the volume control on an airplane headset. I had two settings: Very Hi and Very Low. Even three weeks in, Jules had to go through all my circles and bleed off mana. But I was learning, I was getting better, and that was good enough for me.

  Chapter 20

  RED ALERT

  I blew breath over my freezing hands. It was 2AM in the morning, one week before Halloween, and Jules and I were hovering over a rose bush.

  “Cut it clean, Dieter.”

  “Stars above, Jules. I’m using shears, how could I not cut it clean?”

  “Oh, you’ll find a way. I’m sure a’that ya butcher.”

  I snipped off the stem and took a knee.

  “For you, my love. A rose by any other name would still smell as sweet as your feet.”

  Jules smacked me on the back of the head.

  “Oi! Cut the crap, Dieter. Put the rose in the workspace and get ta the extractions. The longer we wait the harder it’ll be ta re-fuse.”

  I rubbed my freezing fingers together. Tonight’s assignment was to graft a cut rose back onto it’s stem. The dean had handed Jules and I this special assignment in place of helping with Lambda’s Man-Dough project. If we could re-fuse a rose, maybe with fifty years more work, we could re-attach an arm like the pros did for Susan Collins. Fixing plants is much easier than fixing folks. Veggies are resilient. They don’t mind if you accidently lop off a few leaves. Humans? Not so much.

  Tonight, I was in charge of setting up the extraction fields, and as usual, volume control was an issue. Standing over the first circle, I tried for the nice steady strand of mana sweeping through the ground below me. I came up with the Big Whopper instead. The power surged, and the circle groaned in protest. Dust started whipping up around me. I struggled to dump the flow, but I was too slow about it. The surge cascaded into the adjacent transmutation where Jules was working. The surge overloaded it, the spell ruptured, and Jules jumped backwards as the field discharged where her face had just been. Her robe kicked up of the ground and blew over her head.

  “Fockin’aye, Dieter!” she exclaimed.

  I had no energy to spare on a response. I was still struggling to force the massive boulder of mana back into place. The rose at the center of the trefoil withered to dust. The blades of grass around it doubled in size.

  “Awen’s Ghost…” Jules eyed the bizarre transmutation. “You’re about as delicate as Shiva.”

  “A little bit of help?” I asked through a grimace.

  “Aye. Aye.” Jules hustled over to bleed the flow.

  A beautiful stream of flame sprung from her hand into the night air.

  “Oooh, violet,” I remarked, watching the brilliant purple geyser soar high above the tree line. “That’s a new color, right?”

  Jules looked at me in exasperation. “That it is, Dieter. And you know what? That’s officially the last color in the fockin’ rainbow. I’ve diffused so many of yer near disasters that I’ve mastered every last hue.”

  “Maybe you should try for a rainbow next time. We could lure a Leprechaun. Get us some gold.”

  Jules planted her hands on her hips. Her ill-fitting spectacles slid down to the tip of her nose. “Haven’t you been doing yer readings? Like we would want to be attracting one a’them shysters.”

  “Oh. Right.” Leprechauns had a rather bad reputation for mischief. They did little stuff like swipe your bankcard and liquidate your assets. Professor Simons estimated that they were responsible for at least half the identity thefts in the United States alone. To me, Leprechauns seemed rather harmless. Then again, I had nothing worth stealing.

  Jules began massaging her temples. “Dieter, that’ll be enough for tonight. We’re out of roses—and I need a drink.” Jules walked to the edge of the clearing and yanked the tarp off a collection of tanks and tubes, grabbed two plastic cups, and after a few pumps of a plunger, filled them full of imported Irish ale. It had taken Jules some doing to get a keg of her hometown ale shipped all the way across the Atlantic, but Ms. Nelson was nothing if not persistent.

  “But, milady, what of the purity of yer vessel?” I asked in my best Irish accent.

  “Dieter Resnick, any hope of purity died when you arrived on the scene,” Jules replied in a perfect Midwestern drawl.

  “Proud product of the City of Sin, me darlin’,” I said, accepting a brew.

  “Let’s get going. It’s nearly three, and I’ve got an exam tomorrow.”

  We gathered our things for the trek back to campus. Jules and I trudged through the moist multicolor leaves that carpeted the ground. Growing up in a desert, I didn’t think much of the seasons. It got a bit cooler, then it got a bit warmer, but not so much as a leaf changed. East Coast seasons were another story. They went all out. Full costume changes and whatnot. No expense was spared. So far I had watched the dark greens of summer transition to the reds, yellows, and browns of fall. Soon, I would get to see my first snowstorm.

  Sleeping Giant forest was a truly beautiful place, so beautiful that it had been designated a state park. The craggily mountain that the park was named after loomed off in the distance. Dante said you could climb to the top of it and see for miles. (I’d never done so. Jules made good and sure any free time I had was spent training.) Sleeping Giant forest was also a great place to practice magic. No camping was allowed, and all the normal visitors had to leave the parking lots by dusk. From then on, Elliot students had the few square miles of forest all to themselves. There were practice facilities all over the place, but I’d only visited the Woodworks.

  I paused for a moment, my shoulders sagging. We’d been doing this crap for three months…

  “You know, Jules, I don’t think I’m cut out for this kind of work.”

  Jules giggled. “What a remarkable conclusion, professor. Of course yer not. That’s the point. Without addressing yer weaknesses, yer never goin’ ta get anywhere.”

  “And after we get this volume issue under control?”

  “Then I can finally get some work done! Greggs is up my arse about this rose fusion bit as it be.”

  My frown deepened. Jules was right. I wasn’t the only one suffering. Training me was eating up all of Jules’ time too.

  She gave me a playful shove. “I just be jesting, ya thicko. I ain’t plannin’ on breakin’ up our little coven. After we fix the volume thing, we start refinin’ yer craft. You know, expand on what yer good at.”

  “Says the adept to the initiate.”

  “Hey now, Dieter, don’t be that way. It takes me about a minute to set up an extraction—and I’ve been trainin’ since I was a toddler. You waltzed onto campus and turned Central’s basement into a sugary ocean on yer very first try.”

  I pulled off my wool cap and mussed up my hair. “What can I say? Me mongo. Me smash.”

  “Na, that be a sack-a-bull, Dieter. You may not be able to control yer quantities yet, but yer executin’ an extraction every darn time. That’s more consistent than that Tiger Woods be at free throws.”

  I cringed. Sports weren’t Jules Nelson’s strong suit.

  “Thanks for the encouragement, Jules, but I…” That was strange…I looked left and right. “Hey, Jules? Do you feel something funny?”

  Jules stopped walking and listened. We were at the fringe of the forest looking across the lawns at the school dorms, but the once familiar space felt…off. The flows of mana are part of the natural landscape. You’d notice if I were to remove a tree from out front of your house. The same goes for mana. Jules and I knew this forest well. We walked it every night. I could sense the magical fortifications and counter-hexes as they drew power from the leyline (didn’t know what they did, mind you, but I could sense them). I could feel the rumbling leyline as it rolled through the bedrock just beneath my feet. And I could notice when something was altered. Right now, it felt like someone had rearranged the deck chairs on our front porch.

  A bran
ch cracked, and an owl fluttered off into the night. Grabbing my shoulder, Jules dropped us both into a crouch. Good rule of thumb: if the animals spook, so should you.

  “Féach,” Jules whispered. She pointed into the mist ahead of us.

  The hair rose on the back of my neck. Jules rarely slid back into Gaelic. I strained my eyes against the light sheet of fog. Failing at that, I threw more energy into my Sight at the expense of my hearing and smell. I let out a steamy breath. There where five darkened figures hustling away from IKΛM. They were dressed entirely in black—and were heavily armed.

  “What the hell?” I whispered.

  “Something’s not right,” Jules whispered back. “They don’t look like students.”

  No shit, Sherlock.

  “That, or we’re going to have to give Maria a hard time for not scoring us some grenades and body armor.”

  The five men hustling across the lawn collected around a sixth. He wore a dark black robe, and I could sense the magic on him. He was working an incantation. As we watched in silence, a slit appeared in the air in front of him.

  “A translocation?” Jules whispered. “Translocation magic isn’t supposta be possible inside Elliot’s gates. A ton of counters are cocked’n ready. That’s why Maria’s paella-portation failed. You should have seen it, Dieter. The neddy nearly lost her arm for her troubles.”

  I had never seen a translocation before, but whatever the mage was casting was consuming some serious energy. No wonder we had sensed it. The slit in the air quivered. The ethereal blue edges began to peel apart—but the air seemed resistant to the effort. The mage poured forth even more mana from the leyline. He was dousing the incantation with a fire hose, but even then, the slit only peeled open slightly. Cursing, the mage grasped at something around his neck. For a single instant the blue light emanating from the gate flashed across the ruby red pendant.

  “ACT,” I said in shock. “Jules, that son of a bitch has an ACT device.”