“So a spell runs along a different axis depending on the colour of the essence used?”
“Not really, the colour is a simplification, a codification. A spell can be confined to a single axis, or it can be positioned anywhere within the sphere defined by the three axes. A spell can begin near the Dark pole, curve away toward Energy, and end with its tail wrapped around Order. You have already experienced a second-axis spell with a third-axis definitive—the transference shifts Matter to Energy and Energy through an Order-matrix to Matter once more. There are many patterns one can draw, and each one has a different effect. That is what makes three-axis magic so complex. That is why we need to study so hard. Without knowledge, we might cast a spell which backfires or collapses and turns into Chaos. We must know precisely what the pattern will do before we can wield it. We must understand the mathematics. We must resolve the equation and define the outcome before we cast every spell.”
“Which is why your rainbow essence worries us so, because it is such a unique state,” the Mystery explained. “We cannot yet determine what your spells really do, whether they enhance Chaos or Order, Dark or Light, Energy or Matter.”
“It seems your spell spreads as a wave, rather than as moving particles,” said the Lorewarden. “It is most bizarre. Most paradoxical.”
“And then you’ve twisted life into your pattern as well,” added the Mystery. “Now that’s a miracle that none of us have ever achieved.”
“But you must have some power over life. You’re all ... very old, aren’t you? And you look young.”
“Oh no,” replied the Lorewarden, “that is just the Restitution spell. It is merely a re-ordering of matter into a memorised state. If one of us had to die, none of us could bring that wizard back to life. We are old, but we are not omnipotent. We cannot pass life on to anything.”
“Neither can the Sorcerer,” the Mystery added. “He only has a talent for taking life away.”
And he would take Ethea’s life away. Tabitha needed to learn the secret of how to reach Turmodin.
“I’m still not sure I understand what you meant about the three axes,” Tabitha said. “Could you show me what you mean with something like the Transference spell?”
“Transference?” The Lorewarden shared a glance with the Mystery. “I’m not sure that we should begin with something so grand. That one takes years of practice to perfect. I doubt you’d apprehend the pattern quite right.”
“You would need foundation classes too,” added the Mystery. “To be sure you understood the forms.”
“Well how am I ever to return to Oldenworld without the Transference?”
“You are in the safest place you could be, right now.”
“You have so much to learn,” added the Mystery.
“I didn’t come here to study! Twardy Zarost said I must present my problem to the Gyre. I must save Ethea!” Had Zarost really helped her by bringing her to the Sanctuary, or had he merely found somewhere to contain her and keep her out of trouble?
“You are too valuable to risk in Oldenworld now,” declared the Mystery. “We’ll not permit it.”
“Be patient, Lifesinger,” added the Lorewarden. “You must be prepared first.”
“I will not stay in this-this-monument!”
Tabitha felt the walls of the library closing in upon her—all those shelves and shelves of books, that immense weight of knowledge. It pressed upon her. It contained her, limiting her. The Gyre wizards would probably expect her to learn all of their wondrous lore before considering her to be ready, even though they admitted that her power was different. She would be trapped in the Sanctuary of the Gyre until she learnt the Transference spell. They would teach it to her last, she realised, last of all the lores.
“Where is Twardy Zarost?” she demanded.
“The Riddler? He is abroad. He has been put in charge of tracing the Warlock for us.”
Had Twardy Zarost brought her to the Sanctuary to deliver her into captivity? He had encouraged her to come; he had separated her from Garyll and Mulrano. He had promised her that no harm would come to her, but could he be trusted? He was, after all, a member of the Gyre. He was, after all, the Riddler.
Even Zarost might not be willing to help her escape.
“Can you show me how the three-axis system works with the spell you all used at the dinner table, the one which moved things from one place to another?”
“That is the Reference,” replied the Lorewarden. “Yes, that is much simpler, and it doesn’t matter nearly as much if you get it wrong. I can show you the Reference, but don’t ever presume you can use it on a living body. It only works on inanimate objects.” He gave her a warning glance. “A Reference would move the body without moving the being, and both would perish instantly.”
Tabitha tried to cover her disappointment.
“Come,” said the Lorewarden. “Not in here, the books are too precious. We go to the asylum.” He led her through the long library then through three heavy doors to an adjoining hall. It was a thick-walled circular enclosure with a domed roof and a slightly dished floor. Although it was clean, the walls and floor were pitted and scarred. The Lorewarden sent Light essence blooming in a grid across the high roof. They stepped out onto the bare stone floor.
The Lorewarden made a gesture in the air with some clear essence. It shifted to gold and a small cube of sugar appeared in his hand. “That’s from the stores. So, if we wanted to move this cube from here, to there,” he said, pointing to a point a few paces away on the floor, “we would have to define the start and end-point in our Order matrix. All you are doing is moving an item relative to the space in which it is placed. You do not need to alter the item itself, just its placement. And so it is a simple movement of essence on the Order axis. What you are modifying is the arrangement of things. See?” He made the same gesture with his hands. His fingertips left a faint pattern in the clear essence, but because of the pale floor and dim light it was difficult to see.
“What is it? I can’t make it out.”
The Lorewarden paused. “You can’t see the pattern?”
“Well not all of it. I can see the clear essence moving, but the design is too fine and too small.” She drew on her ring for clarity, but even with its assistance she couldn’t discern the detail of the Lorewarden’s fading spell. “And I don’t see what you mean about the Order axis. How do you know which way it’s going? Where is the third axis? Where are any of the axes?”
“She should have an eye,” the Mystery said. “She’s not going to apprehend the third axis without it. Her art uses different sensitivities.”
“Mystery, she should have no special treatment,” the Lorewarden replied. “An eye was always earned, in the college, and only when the wizard was ready.”
“And I maintain that she is an exceptional wizard, and needs exceptional treatment. If she can see things as we see them, it will help her to understand. I feel it is important. Here.” The Mystery held out her hand. On it was a small blue box with a gilded design of an eye in a circle.
“You have brought one with you?” said the Lorewarden, incredulous. “You knew that this moment would come!”
“Yes.”
“You are certain that the Lifesinger needs this?”
“The futures where she has the eye seem better than the ones where she does not have it, yes.”
Tabitha accepted the slim box from the Mystery. It was so light she thought it might remain floating in the air if she took her hand away from underneath it.
“Which version is that?” asked the Lorewarden, looking at the box suspiciously.
“The final Screed, Lorewarden, the ogle-i, the one that includes the parameterised induction lore just like the ones we wear. I have always kept a spare eye safe.”
The Lorewarden looked surprised. “I thought that the others ogles were all lost. Ah, I see, you kept it hidden because you knew it would be needed much later. This is one of your moments, not so, Mystery?”
&nbs
p; The Mystery held the Lorewarden’s gaze. Her green eyes blazed with confidence.
“Well then, it seems the Lifesinger is to be awarded a rare privilege,” he said.
Tabitha opened the box. It was empty: just a shallow tray, with a blue velvet lining. Tabitha looked up at the wizards, but they were still looking at the box, so she dropped her gaze again. Was there something in it that she couldn’t see? She moved her palm, and light glinted off something that rested inside the box, on the velvet. She was about to reach into the box when the Mystery stopped her.
“Careful,” she warned. “Watch.”
She placed her finger over the mysterious object. A sudden star of golden threads bloomed within it, a pattern of light that defined a circle and left traces swirling upon its surface when it cleared. Symbols flickered to life briefly, like a scattering of arcane letters reflected upon the surface of a small lens. Then something strange happened to the light within the room, as if the colours were draining out of everything nearby, running inward toward the small circle within the box. Tabitha was drawn forward, as if the circlet was gathering a part of her.
The Mystery lifted her finger again, and the disturbance ceased, the patterns vanishing. Just a clear empty circle rested on the velvet. Tabitha now knew that there was something there, but it was even clearer than the crystal clarity of her wizard’s ring.
“Your turn,” urged the Mystery. “Don’t touch it, just activate it. I must see your reflected potential before I can be sure you can bear it.”
Tabitha reached out with one finger. The images raced across the surface of the lens again, ghostly faces crisscrossed with faint tracelines and symbols that pushed upward in a bright fountaining rush. A golden star bloomed brightly. Then the star faded again, and patterns moved within its depths; faintly-scribed lines that rose through the liquid clarity. Its strange beauty intrigued her. It was gathering the light again, draining the pigments from the day. Variable hues danced upon the convex surface, like oil upon water.
“My word,” whispered the Lorewarden.
“Why did you call it an eye?” Tabitha asked.
“Because that’s what it is,” the Mystery replied. “That’s how you wear it.”
“I don’t see.”
“It is a lens, Lifesinger. It goes in your eye. You’ve seen the power flower, so it is activated. You will see things through it that will enhance your talent. You will come to see things the way we see things, and so you will understand.”
“Gather it up,” encouraged the Lorewarden. “Gather it up.”
“Are you sure?” The idea of placing something in her eye seemed strange to her. “Won’t it hurt?”
“It will be soft, it adjusts to the shape of your eye,” answered the Mystery. “The wizard’s eye is from the height of the Three Kingdoms, it is the most sophisticated example of Order-forged technology. I have worn one for over five hundred years, Lifesinger. It is an invaluable tool. I would be practically blind without it.”
Tabitha looked uncertainly at the Mystery. If she looked into her right eye, she could see faint golden lore dancing over her green iris. The more she looked, the brighter the scribe-lines became—tiny threads of information, crossing the Mystery’s sight. She realised she had seen the golden flecks in every wizard’s eye. All of them had that glint in their right eye. Especially the Riddler, now that she thought about it.
“Your ring works, doesn’t it?” asked the Lorewarden. “That is much cruder than the Eye. The lens is a tool of a much higher order.”
Her ring was warmer than ever on her finger. It had changed her perception of the world, and she had been better for what she had discovered. The eye was a masterpiece in comparison to the ring? Tabitha felt a thrill of anticipation. What would she see when the lens was in her eye?
“Balance it upon your fingertip,” instructed the Mystery as Tabitha reached for the wizard’s eye.
Strange symbols fluttered within it, coming up toward her, gyrating patterns and structures of light. She raised it slowly, watching the images. The little lens shimmered, almost vibrating with a flood of rainbow colours.
The lens jumped to her eye. The contact was sudden. She blinked in surprise. It was all a blur in her right eye, full of light and shifting patterns. Then suddenly everything came into focus.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, for the Lorewarden had become entangled in a network of threads. The Mystery was also surrounded by a swirling halo. Lines and arcs crossed Tabitha’s vision, as if a mad draughtsman was sketching over everything she could see, marking off measurements, outlining elements, highlighting lines of movement and areas of force. The two wizards backed away from her as if to give her space, and as they did so, symbols trailed off them like thistledown. Tabitha looked up and down and around herself in amazement.
She had entered a world of arcane knowledge, encoded in the ogle-i and released all around her, floating in her vision like a translucent shifting painting. She reached out to touch the filaments of golden light, but there was nothing there to touch, and her hands did not disturb the designs. Instead, new lines converged on her hands, concentric circles ran off her fingers, and her ring blazed within a cluster of runes.
She looked across the pitted floor.
The two wizards jumped toward her as she looked at them. She fell back, startled, fending them off with her hands, and the wizards jumped away. She concentrated on the wizards again and they were suddenly close.
“Steady,” said the Mystery. “It will take a little while to get used to it. Your intent drives the field of view.” She realised from the distance of the Mystery’s voice that she was confused. The wizards weren’t any nearer, they were just closer in sight, although she could see the stubble on the Lorewarden’s chin clearly, she was aware of the distance that separated them. It was just like the way the ring had enhanced her senses, but it was a hundredfold more powerful. It was the strangest sensation. If she concentrated on seeing him through her right eye, he seemed within arm’s reach, but if she looked more leftly at him, he seemed to retreat again, and the scribe-lines faded.
There were lines below the floor. She couldn’t be sure that it was solid any more. She was standing on an ocean of lore. The world was a composite diagram that showed her the inside of things as well as the outside. She began to feel horribly queasy.
The door of the hall, the serpentine Light upon the roof, the stitching around the toes of her boots, all responded in the same way when she turned her gaze upon them, sliding nearer, slipping farther away. She looked at the sugar cube the Lorewarden still held in his palm, and tried to hold her gaze steady on that alone, trying to settle her rolling stomach. Two faint lines ran away from her on either hand, like a scratch-line scribed on glass, curving to converge and cross on the sugar cube.
Then she saw his spell, the design in clear essence that he’d completed but not released. The pattern came closer and closer the more she willed it to. She saw that the clear essence was now surrounded by series of delicate lines which described its movement. As she centred her sight upon that, she noticed three axes dividing the spell, forming a grid in three dimensions, allowing her to pinpoint where the Lorewarden’s pattern flowed. She followed the light-lines, letting the strange moving guides lead her attention along the arced and crisscrossed course of the spell, and slowly she began to understand the pattern. It looked like a piece of fine string looped randomly around the third axis, some way from the origin, but she knew it wasn’t random or tolerant of any inaccuracies in the positioning of the individual loops of essence. She didn’t know if it was the suggestive power of the strange symbols, or whether it came to her from some other aspect of the eye, but the knowledge seemed to flow into her mind, filling her with a gathering weight, like a sponge growing heavier as it absorbed water: the Reference spell, this was the Reference spell, and it was a third-axis manipulation one third of a struct toward the Order pole, with a secondary feeding loop of one seventh of an animatus on the Energy side used
to dislodge the spatial inertia of the objective.
Tabitha squeezed her eyes shut. She was learning things she should not know how to use, and yet she did.
It was blissfully dark behind her eyelids. Simple. Empty.
She opened her eyes. The lens overwhelmed her with details again. A shimmer of scribe-lines hovered at the limit of her vision, just waiting for her to focus on something so they could pounce upon it and separate her sight into the many layers of arcane symbols. The lore was too detailed, too rich; too complex.
Tabitha tried to ignore the details and focused instead on the sugarcube. She gathered clear essence to her hand then watched the Lorewarden’s spell pattern where it turned in the air just above the cube, and she copied it using her own essence, weaving it around the third of three axes which appeared in her vision. She tried her best to be precise, copying every curve, bend and twist of the design. Then she released the clear essence.
Clusters of illuminated squiggles rushed away from her. They swept over the sugar cube, converged, and dissipated. Nothing else happened. The sugar cube was still visible in the Lorewarden’s hand. The Lorewarden smiled.
“Why hasn’t it moved?” she asked.
“Because my spell is over-riding it. You see, you cannot have two spells like the Reference targeting the same point in space. How could two objects exist in the same place at the same moment? Build your pattern and try it again.”
Second Sight: Second Tale of the Lifesong Page 54