by Rick Cook
When she had the mixture of dried meat, fruit and barley simmering in a small bronze pot, she pulled out her shoulder bag and motioned Wiz to sit down beside her in the firelight.
"You must not be used to work," she said as she rummaged in her kit.
"You don’t get many blisters at a VT 220," he agreed.
Moira looked blank.
"It’s a terminal. A, ah, thing that… oh, forget it."
Moira produced a tiny earthenware jar and smeared the raw and blistered places on Wiz’s palms with the dark, pungent salve it contained.
"Your hands should be healed by morning," she told him, scraping salve from her finger back into the jar. "We should cover those, but I don’t have anything to put over them."
"That’s fine," Wiz said. "It doesn’t hurt anymore. Whatever that stuff is, it works like a charm."
"Oh, it’s not a charm," Moira said seriously. "Just a healing potion. With the proper charm I could heal your hands instantly, but that would take magic and it might attract attention." She moved away from him to check the contents of the pot.
"You’re a magician, right?" he asked, trying to recapture the moment.
Moira shrugged. "In a small way. I am a hedge witch."
"That’s interesting. What does a hedge witch do?"
"What do I do? Oh, herbs and simples. A little healing. Some weather magic. I try to warn of dangers, find lost objects and strayed animals." She lifted the pot off the fire and produced two wooden bowls and horn spoons from her pack.
"Eat now," she said. "You can use a spoon well enough even with your hands."
The mixture in the pot looked awful but tasted surprisingly good. The tartness of the fruit and the rich saltiness of the meat blended well with the bland barley.
"Is Bal-Simba a hedge witch too?"
Moira laughed, a delightful sound. "No, Bal-Simba is of the Mighty." Her face clouded. "Probably he is the Mightiest of the Mighty now that Patrius is dead." She returned to her eating.
"What do the Mighty do?" Wiz asked in an effort to keep the conversation going.
"They are our greatest wizards. They teach the other orders, they help wherever great magic is required, they study arcane lore and they try to protect us from the Dark League." She sighed. "These days mostly they try to protect us from the Dark League."
"Why aren’t they protecting us then?"
Moira looked annoyed. "They are protecting us, Sparrow. Bal-Simba stayed behind to cast false trails to confuse the League’s agents who sought to spy us out. The whole North is protected by the Watchers of the Council of the North who blunt the League’s efforts to use their magic here. Even now the Watchers are doubtless holding off the League’s efforts to search us out. Just because you cannot see the works of the Mighty, never doubt they protect you, Sparrow."
"Sorry."
"You should be sorry."
They sat in uncomfortable silence.
"What’s magic like?" Wiz asked at last.
"Like?" Moira asked, puzzled. "t’s not like anything. It simply is. Magic is the basic stuff of the World. We swim in a sea of magic like fish in the ocean."
"And you can make it work for you?"
"A magician can make magic work for himself or herself. But there are very few magicians. Perhaps one person in one hundred has any talent at all for magic and far, far fewer ever become truly skilled."
Wiz studied the effect of the firelight on her hair and eyes. "How do you learn to do magic?"
"You find a magician to take you as an apprentice. Then you study and practice and learn as much as you can. Eventually you either cannot learn more or you must travel to find a more advanced teacher."
"But there aren’t schools or anything?"
Moira snorted. "Magic is a craft, Sparrow. It cannot be learned by rote like sums or the days of the week."
"How did you learn?"
"There was a hedge witch in the village that took me in after… after I left home. He taught me what he could. Then I traveled to the Capital and studied under some of the wizards there." She sighed. "I did not have talent of a high order so I became hedge witch for the village of Blackbrook Bend."
"So, how do you work magic?"
"First you must know what you are doing," Moira said. "Then you must perform the appropriate actions with the proper phrases. If you do it correctly and if you make no mistakes, then you make magic work for you."
Wiz gestured with the stick he had used to poke up the fire. "You mean if I wave a magic wand and say—uh—’bippity bobbity boo’ then… ?"
A lance of flame shot from the smouldering end of the stick into the heart of the campfire. The blaze exploded in a ball of incandescent white and an evil orange column soared above the tops of the trees. Wiz gasped for breath in the suffocating blast of heat. Through the haze and blinding glare he saw Moira, on her feet and gesturing frantically.
Suddenly it was quiet. The fire was a friendly little campfire again and the cool night air flowed into Wiz’s lungs and soothed his scorched face. Moira stood across the fire from him, her hair singed, her cloak smouldering and her eyes blazing.
"Yes." She snapped. "That’s exactly what I mean."
"I’m sorry," Wiz stammered. "I didn’t mean to…" Then his jaw dropped. "Hey, wait a minute. That was magic!"
"That was stupid," the hedge witch countered, beating out an ember on her cloak.
"No, I mean I worked magic," Wiz said eagerly. "That means I am a magician. Bal-Simba was wrong." He grinned and shook his head. "Son of a gun."
"What you are is an idiot," Moira snapped. "Any fool can work magic, and far too many fools do."
"But…"
"Didn’t you listen to anything I just told you? Magic is all around us. It is easy to make. Any child can do it. If you are careless you can make it by accident as you just did."
"Well, if it’s so easy to make…"
"Sparrow, easy to make and useful are not the same thing. To be useful magic must be controlled. Could you have stopped what you just created just now? Of course not! If I had not been here you would have burned the forest down. A careless word, a thoughtless gesture and you loose magic on the world."
She stopped and looked around the clearing for signs of live coals. "And mark well, magic is not easy to learn. There are a hundred ways, perhaps a thousand of doing what you just did. And most of them are useless because they cannot be controlled. Without control magic is not just useless, it is hideously dangerous."
"But I still made magic," Wiz protested.
Moira snorted. "You made it once. By accident. What makes you think you could do it again?"
"What makes you think I couldn’t?" Wiz countered, picking up the stick. "All I have to do is point at the fire and say…"
"Don’t," Moira yelled. "Don’t even think of trying it again."
Wiz lowered the stick and looked at her.
"Sparrow, heed me and heed me well. The chance that you could do that again is almost nil. The essence of success in magic is to repeat absolutely everything with not the tiniest variation every single time you recite a spell."
She gestured at him. "Look at you. You have shifted your stance, you are holding the stick at a different angle, you are facing southeast instead of North, you are… oh, different in a dozen ways. Could you say those words with exactly the same inflection? Could you give your wrist exactly the twist you used in the gesture? Could you clench your left hand in exactly the same way?"
"Is all that important?"
"All that is vital," Moira told him. "All that and much more. The phase of the moon, the angle of the sun. The hour of the day or night. All enter into magic and all must be considered.
"No matter what you have been told, magical talent does not consist of some special affinity for magic, some supernatural gift. Magical ability is the ability to control what you produce. And that turns on noticing the tiniest detail of what is done and being able to repeat it flawlessly."
That makes
a weird kind of sense, Wiz admitted to himself. Like programming. There’s no redundancy in the language and the tiniest mistake can have major consequences. Look at all the time I’ve spent going over code trying to find the missing semicolon at the end of a statement, or a couple of transposed letters. It also meant he probably was a magical klutz. He was the kind of guy who walked into doors and spent five minutes hunting for his car every time he went to the mall.
"Wait a minute, though," Wiz said. "If all it takes is a good memory, why can’t most people learn to do magic?"
Moira flicked a strand of coppery hair away from her face with an exasperated gesture. "A good memory is the least part of what we call the talent."
"Sure, but with practice…"
"Practice!" Moira snorted. "Perform a spell incorrectly and you may not get the opportunity to do it again.
"Look you, when those without the talent attempt a spell, one of three things will happen. The first, and far away the most likely outcome is that nothing at all will happen. What comes out is so far removed from the true spell that is it completely void. That is the most favorable result because it does no harm and it discourages the practitioner.
"The second thing that can happen is that the spell goes awry, usually disastrously so." She smiled grimly. "Every village has its trove of stories of fools who sought to make magic and paid for their presumption. Some villages exist no longer because of such fools.
"The third thing is that the spell is successful. That happens perhaps one out of every thousand attempts." She frowned. "In some ways that is the worst. It encourages the fool to try again, often on a grander scale."
"So what you’re saying is that its easy to make magic by accident but hard to do on purpose."
"Say rather virtually impossible to do on purpose." Moira corrected. "Without the talent and proper training you cannot do it.
"But there is another level of complication beyond even that," Moira went on. "A magician must not only be able to recite spells successfully, he or she must thoroughly understand their effects and consequences." She settled by the fire and spread her cloak. "Do you know the tale of the Freshened Sea?"
Wiz shook his head.
"Then listen and learn.
"Long ago on a small island near the rim of the Southern Sea (for it was then so called) there lived a farmer named Einrich. His farm was small, but the soil was good and just over the horizon was the Eastern Shore where the people would pay good money for the fruits his island orchards produced. All he lacked was fresh water for his trees, for the rains are irregular there and he had but one tiny spring.
"Some years the rains were scant and so were his crops of apples and pears. Some years they came not at all and Einrich spent day after weary day carrying buckets of water so his trees would not perish.
"All around him was water, but he had not enough fresh to feed his groves. Daily he looked at the expanse of sea stretching away to the horizon on all sides and daily he cursed the lack.
"Now this Einrich, ill-fortune to him!, had some talent for magic. He dabbled in it, you see, and somehow he survived his dabblings. That gave him knowledge and a foolish pride in his own abilities.
"So Einrich conceived a plan to give him more water. He concocted and cast a spell to turn the water around his island fresh.
"He constructed a demon, bound it straitly, and ordered him to make fresh the water around his island."
"Wait a minute," Wiz said. "What do you mean he ’constructed’ a demon?"
"Demons are the manifestations of spells, not natural creatures as the ignorant believe," Moira said. "They are the products of human or non-human magicians, although they may live long beyond their creators.
"To continue: In doing this, Einrich was foolhardy beyond belief. Great spells work against great forces and if they are not done properly the forces lash back. Einrich was not so fortunate as to die from the effects of his bungling. His house was blasted to ruin and a huge black burn still marks the spot on the island, but he survived and the water around his island turned to fresh.
"He spent all the long summer days working in his orchards while the fruit swelled and ripened on his trees. With plentiful water his fruit was the largest and finest ever. So when the time came he harvested all his boat could bear and set out for his markets on the east coast of the sea.
"He thought it odd that he saw no other vessels, for usually the waters inshore were the haunt of fishing vessels and merchantmen trading in the rich goods of the east. Einrich sailed on, finding nothing in the water save an occasional dead fish.
"When he sighted land his unease grew. For in place of the low green hills of the Eastern land he saw cliffs of dazzling white. As he drew closer he realized that the familiar hills had turned white, so white the reflections almost blinded him.
"He sought the familiar harbors but he could not find them. All was buried under drifts of white, as if huge dunes of sand had devoured the land.
"And instead of the sweet scent of growing things, the land breeze brought him the odor of rotting fish. All along the shoreline were windrows of dead sea creatures. Here and there a starving seabird tore eagerly at the decaying flesh.
"Finally, Einrich put ashore in a cove. When he stepped from his boat he stepped onto a beach of salt.
"Einrich had bound his demon to its task, but he had not limited it. The whole of the Southern Sea had been turned to fresh water. The fish within could not live in the fresh water, so they died.
"Worse, Einrich had not instructed the demon where to put the salt it winnowed. The creature simply dumped it on the nearest shoreline. In the space of a few days the greatest and most beautiful cities of the World disappeared under waves and rifts of salt. Their people perished or were doomed to roam the world as homeless wanderers—living testaments to the power of magic ill-used.
"And to this day the demon sits in the Freshened Sea, sifting salt from the water and dumping it on the land. The eastern shores are a desert of salt and the water is still fresh."
"What happened to Einrich?" Wiz asked, awed.
Moira smiled grimly. "A suitable punishment was arranged. If you travel to that cursed shore, and if you look long enough, you will find Einrich, ever hungry, ever thirsting and hard at work with a shovel, trying to shovel enough salt into the sea to render it salty again."
"Whew," Wiz breathed.
"The point, Sparrow, is that magic is not to be trifled with. Even successful magic can bring ruin in its wake and unsuccessful magic far outnumbers the successful."
"Could I have done something like that, by accident?"
"Unlikely," Moira sniffed. "You do not have a talent for magic and you have no training. You could easily kill yourself or burn down a forest, but you have not the ability to work great magic.
"The most dangerous magicians are the half-trained ones. Either the ones who are still being schooled or who think they are greater than they are. The evil they do often lives after them. They and the League, of course."
"What is the League, anyway? A bunch of black magicians?"
Moira frowned. "They are a dark league. Some of them are black, it is true. But so is Bal-Simba and many others of the North."
"No, I mean magicians who practice black magic. You know, evil spells and things like that."
"Evil magic depends partly on intent and partly on ignoring the consequences," Moira said. "Spells may help or harm but they are not of themselves good or evil."
"Not even a death spell?"
"Not if used to defend oneself, no. Such spells are dangerous and are best avoided, but they are not evil."
"All right, what separates you from this League?"
Moira was silent for a moment. "Responsibility," she said thoughtfully. "Magic is not evil in itself, but tends to affect many things at once. Often the unintended or unwanted effects of a spell are harmful. Like Einrich’s means of getting water for his orchards."
"We called those side effects," Wiz said. "Th
ey’re a pain in the neck in programming too."
"Be that as it may, the question a responsible magician must face is whether the goal is worth the consequences. All the consequences. Those who follow the Council of the North try to use magic in harmony with the World. Those of the League are not so bound."
Moira shifted and the fire caught and heightened the burnished copper highlights in her hair.
"Power is an easy prize for a magician, Sparrow—if you can stay alive and if you are not too nice about the consequences. The ones who join the League see power as an end to itself. They magic against the World and scheme and intrigue among themselves to get it."
Wiz nodded. "I’ve known hackers like that. They didn’t care what they screwed up as long as they got what they wanted."
"It may be so on all the worlds," Moira sighed. "There are always those whose talent and ambition are unchecked by concern for others. If they have no magical talent they may become thieves, robbers and cheats. With talent they are likely to travel south and join with the Dark League."
"Why go south. Why not just stay and make trouble?"
"Two reasons. First, the Council will not have them in the civilized lands. Second, they must still serve an apprenticeship no matter how much talent they have." She smiled tightly. "The tests for an apprentice are stringent and many of them are aimed at uncovering such people.
"Once they pass over the Freshened Sea they are beyond the Council’s reach. They are free to work whatever magic they wish and that place shows the results. All of the Southern Shore is alight with mountains of fire and the earth trembles constantly from the League’s magic. The land is so blasted that none can live there save by magic. The very World itself pays the price for the lusts of the League."
"Why put up with them at all? When we had problems like that we’d kick the troublemakers off the system. Or turn them over to the cops—ah, the authorities."
"You have an easier time than we do, Sparrow," Moira said ruefully. "There is no way to bar a magician from making magic, so we cannot ’kick them off the system.’ As for the authorities, well, the Council exists in part to check the League but this is not a thing easily done.