Taking Flight loe-5

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  “All right, it’s like this,” she explained. “Wizardry, as near as anybody can figure out, works by tapping into the chaos that reality is made out of — and if you don’t understand that that’s fine, because I don’t either, that’s just what Kalirin told me. It does this by taking magically-charged symbols — stuff like dragon’s blood or mashed spider legs — and ritually combining them in patterns that break through into that chaos. Or at least, that’s what the wizards think they’re doing, but nobody really knows for sure, they just know that if you do this and this and this, then that’ll happen. If you put a pinch of brimstone on the point of your... um, on your dagger and fling it in the air while you say the right magic word, it’ll start a fire — but nobody really knows why it does that, and why it doesn’t work if you try it with, say, phosphorus — I mean, phosphorus burns better than brimstone, so it ought to work, right? But it doesn’t. And it has to be a dagger that’s enchanted a particular way, too.”

  Kelder nodded.

  “And some of the spells take hours to do, or even days,” Irith said. “And some of the ingredients are a real nuisance to get hold of, you know? So it’s just not very convenient, being a wizard. It’s not like theurgy, where you can just call on a god and ask for a favor, or warlockry, where I don’t know what they do but it seems to work right away without any spells or equipment or anything.”

  “So...” Kelder prompted.

  “So,” Irith said, “this wizard Javan, who was some kind of genius or something, started looking for ways to get rid of all the rituals and magic words and rare ingredients and things. He wanted to find some way to get right at that chaos or whatever it is without all the in-between stuff. And he figured that if the ingredients are just symbols for something in the underlying chaos, then why can’t we use symbols of symbols? The way we use words as symbols, maybe. And he found a way he could sort of do this, sort of. He found a way to put spells right into a wizard’s brain, or his soul, or somewhere. He still had to do the whole ritual and everything, but he didn’t have to do it all just when he wanted the spell to work, he could do it in advance, and sort of store the spell in his head, ready to go. I mean, he could take some petrifaction spell or something that would take two days to perform, and he would run through the whole two-day ritual, and then his own little spell with it, and that would put the whole thing in his head, and then he could carry it there as long as he wanted, and then when he saw the person he wanted to petrify, he could just point and say a word, and that whole big fancy two-day spell would come pouring out of his head and down his arm, and bang! The person would be turned to stone.” Irith paused. “I think witchcraft works sort of like that, too,” she said, “but I’m not sure.”

  Kelder nodded; Asha looked slightly confused. “But then, if wizards can carry spells around like that, why...” she began.

  Kelder hushed her. “Irith will explain.”

  “Right,” Irith agreed, “I will. So, Javan came up with this, and he called it Javan’s Augmentation of Magical Memory, Javan’s First Augmentation of Magical Memory — because you carry the spells in your head like memories, you see? Anyway, it’s a pretty good spell, it’s hard to do but it’s useful, and it’s still around, but not all that many wizards know it, because it is hard to do, and besides, there are some problems with it.”

  “Like what?” Asha asked.

  “Like, you can only do maybe three spells with it, four if they’re simple ones, maybe only two if they’re big, complicated ones. You can store them away in your head — but while any of them are still in there, you can’t do any other magic. And sometimes they go bad while they’re stored, and they don’t work right when you try them. And each one is only good once — use it, and it’s gone. So if you did a petrifaction spell, and the person you want to use it on has a couple of friends with him with swords, you could be in big trouble, because it’ll only work once. Oh, and there’s no way to get the spells out without using them, so if you store up a curse, and then your victim dies before you use it, you need to find someone else to put the curse on, or it’ll stay in your head forever and you won’t be able to do any other magic at all until you get it out. So it’s not all that useful a spell.”

  Asha nodded.

  “So that’s the First Augmentation,” Kelder said. “What’s the second one?”

  “I’m getting to that,” Irith said. “So Javan had this spell, but it wasn’t everything he wanted, right? I mean, you could only carry three spells and they didn’t always work right, and it was a hard spell to perform in the first place. So he tried to come up with an improvement on it.”

  “The Second Augmentation,” Kelder suggested.

  “That’s right,” Irith agreed. “Except it wasn’t exactly an improvement after all, it’s just different. It lets you carry about a dozen spells, if you do it right, and you can use each one over and over, as many times as you like — but they never come out. And you can’t learn any more magic, ever.”

  Kelder blinked. He thought that over.

  “And there isn’t any counter-spell, at least not that anyone’s ever found. Which is why there wasn’t any Third Augmentation — because Javan tried out the spell, and loaded a dozen spells into his head, or maybe a dozen anyway, and from then on he could use them all as easily as snapping his fingers, but he could never get them out, and he couldn’t do any other magic, ever, and no other wizardry would even work on him, he was so charged full of magic, and since he hadn’t used any youth spells or immortality spells or anything in his experiment, that was the end of him — he lived about another thirty years, I guess, and he could do those ten or twelve spells all he wanted, but he wasn’t any use for anything else.” She grimaced. “Anyway, he’d written the whole thing down, so anyone who wanted — I mean, any wizard who could work high-order magic, because it’s not an easy spell — anyway, anyone who wanted to could see how the spell was done, but nobody ever tried it again.” She took a deep breath.

  “Except me,” she said.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Irith had paused in her story, but Kelder and Asha just waited, and after a moment she began where she had left off.

  “It was... well, I’d heard the story from Kalirin, about how the great Javan went and ruined himself, and I was worried about the war, and I didn’t want to be a wizard, and I was really sick and tired of being an apprentice — I mean, for three years I had worked the skin right off my fingers, doing all this weird stuff,” Irith said. “And it seemed like a good idea, to go ahead and do the spell, and then I’d know some magic, but I couldn’t go into combat because I wouldn’t know the right kind of magic, and I’d never be able to do research — I wouldn’t be able to do any other magic, ever. So I started picking out the spells, and practicing up. The book said that Javan’s Second Augmentation was a seventh-order spell, but it looked a lot easier than that, and I was doing fourth-order spells without much trouble, and I figured that if it didn’t work I wasn’t any worse off. I mean, usually, when a spell doesn’t work right, nothing happens at all. Sometimes it goes wrong, and all kinds of horrible things can happen when that happens, but usually it doesn’t, you see?”

  Kelder nodded.

  “So I started picking out the spells I wanted, and collecting all the ingredients for everything. I can still remember what I needed for the Augmentation — maybe one reason I liked the idea was that there wasn’t anything really yucky in it. I needed three left toes from a black rooster, and a plume from a peacock’s tail, and seven round white stones, six of them exactly the same weight and the seventh three times as much, and a block of this special incense that had been prepared in the morning mist of an open field, and then I needed my wizard’s dagger.” Irith smiled dreamily, leaning on one elbow. “You know, I haven’t thought about this stuff in ages! All that stuff, to work magic!”

  “You don’t have a wizard’s dagger now, do you?” Asha asked.

  “Of course not,” Irith said, sitting up again. “I ha
d to break it as part of the spell. I cut my knee doing it, too.”

  “Go on,” Kelder said.

  “Well, it took a couple of months to get ready,” Irith said, “and then an entire sixnight to work all the spells together. They didn’t all work — I’d picked some that were too hard for me. And some that sort of worked didn’t work right, like the invisibility spell. It was supposed to be Ennerl’s Total Invisibility, but it doesn’t act the way Kalirin’s book said it would; it’s a fifth-order spell, and I didn’t really know how to do stuff above fourth-order, but I figured I could give it a try.” She shrugged. “It’s better than nothing.”

  “So what other spells did you try?” Asha asked.

  “Oh, I picked all the best ones I could find,” Irith said, “but not stuff that the army would want. And I didn’t make Javan’s silly mistake; the very first one I did was a spell of eternal youth, and if that hadn’t worked I wouldn’t even have done the rest, I don’t think. I’m not really sure, because the magic messed up my memory a little bit — but anyway, the spell worked, so I was fifteen then, and I’ll always be fifteen — I can’t get any older unless something breaks the spell, and there isn’t anything that can break the spell!” She smiled brightly.

  “What else?” Kelder asked.

  “Well, there’s a Spell of Sustenance that they used to use on soldiers so they didn’t have to feed them — see this?” She lifted her head and displayed her throat, pulling away the velvet ribbon, and for the first time Kelder realized that the bloodstone she wore there was not on a choker, but set directly into her flesh. “As long as that stone is there, I don’t need to eat or drink or even breathe — but I usually do anyway, because it’s fun, and besides, if I go without too long it feels really weird and I don’t think it’s good for me. And I don’t get tired if I use it, I mean, not the usual way, but it... I don’t like to use it too much.” That explained how she could dance along the road for hours, Kelder realized — and also why she didn’t always, why she had gotten tired when carrying Asha on horseback.

  (Could she use her other magic when not in human shape? She hadn’t said.)

  “And I can change shape, of course,” Irith continued. “I have seven shapes. That’s Haldane’s Instantaneous Transformation, and it was the hardest part — I had to make bracelets from the skin of each animal, and soak them in my own blood stirred with butterfly wings.”

  Kelder remembered the bands around her ankle, and once again, a mystery evaporated.

  “Seven shapes?” Asha asked. “What are they?.”

  Irith hesitated. “Oh, I guess it won’t hurt to tell you,” she said finally. “I can be a horse, or a bird, or a fish, or a cat, or me, or me with wings, or a horse with wings. And before you ask, I can’t carry much when I fly, even as a horse — I couldn’t have just flown us all to Shan. Flying with anything more than my own weight is hard.”

  “How did you get skin from a flying horse?” Kelder asked. He had never heard of flying horses, and certainly had never seen any.

  “Well, I didn’t, really,” Irith admitted. “I used strips of ordinary horsehide braided together, with dove feathers woven in. And for just growing wings, I used dove feathers wound in my own hair.”

  Kelder nodded. “Anything else?” he asked. “Shape-changing, invisibility, eternal youth, the Spell of Sustenance — that’s four, and you said there were a dozen.”

  “I said you could maybe do twelve,” she corrected him. “I only tried ten, and half of them didn’t work.” She shrugged. “I was only an apprentice, after all.”

  “Half — so is there one more?”

  Irith bit her lip, and Kelder thought she blushed slightly; he couldn’t be sure in the dimness of the tavern.

  “There is, isn’t there?” he said. “At least one more.”

  “Just... just one, I think,” she admitted. “And I wish it didn’t work, and I’d gotten one of the protective spells instead, or the one that would let me walk on air, or the one to light fires. I still can’t believe I messed that one up — the fire-lighting spell. I mean, it’s about the simplest spell there is, one of the first things every wizard’s apprentice learns. I think I must have left it until last, and I guess by then I was really tired...”

  “Irith,” Kelder said, cutting her off, “what’s the other spell?” He was not going to let his wife keep any important secrets from him, and while Irith wasn’t his wife yet and didn’t know she would ever be, he knew.

  “...I mean,” she said, “here I was doing seventh-order wizardry, and I couldn’t get Thrindle’s Combustion!..”

  “Irith.”

  “Or maybe,” she went on desperately, “I never even tried it after all — maybe I forgot, or decided it would be too useful for the army. After all, if you use it on something that’s already burning, it explodes, so that would be almost like a weapon, wouldn’t it? So I must have decided not to use it, and my memory’s been playing tricks on me...”

  Kelder leaned across the table and grabbed her by both wrists.

  “Irith,” he said, in what he hoped was a low and deadly tone, “what was the other spell?”

  She stared at him for a moment, then surrendered.

  “It was a love spell,” she said. “Fendel’s Infatuous Love Spell.”

  Kelder sat back, puzzled; why had she been so reluctant to name it? What was so terrible about a love spell? The local farmers back home had told some stories about love potions, and they hadn’t sounded particularly horrible.

  “There might have been another one, maybe,” Irith said, speaking quickly, “I don’t know. It’s really, really hard for me to think about magic sometimes, now, and everything I remember from when I was getting the spell ready is all sort of blurry. But if there were any others, they were one-time things, like the youth spell, not anything I can use over and over...”

  She was trying to distract him again. A dreadful thought struck him.

  “Irith,” he said, “did you try that love spell on me?”

  She stopped in mid-breath and stared at him, shocked. Then she burst into giggles.

  “No, silly!” she said. “Of course not! You don’t love me that much, or you wouldn’t be arguing with me all the time, and asking me all these questions! Don’t you know how love spells... well, no,” she said, calming. “No, I guess you don’t know.”

  “No, I don’t,” he said coldly.

  Even as he spoke, he was thinking. The possibility still remained that she might use the love spell on him in the future; maybe that was why he would marry her. No, he told himself, that was silly. He already wanted to marry her, without any spell — didn’t he?

  “It isn’t all love spells work that way, anyway,” she explained, “but there’s a reason this one is called Fendel’s Infatuous Love Spell.”

  “You’ve used it?” Kelder asked.

  “Well,” she said, “I was worried about the Northerners, you see. So I picked the transformation so I could grow wings and fly away, or turn into a fish and swim away, and I picked the invisibility spell so I could hide from them, and the sustenance spell so I wouldn’t need any food while I was hiding — and the youth spell didn’t have anything to do with the Northerners, I just didn’t want to grow old and mean like Kalirin. But the love spell was so that if the Northerners did catch me, somehow, I could make them love me, so they wouldn’t want to hurt me, you see? That’s all.”

  “But the Northerners never came,” Kelder pointed out.

  “No, they didn’t,” Irith agreed. “After I made the spell, and it worked, mostly, I ran away and hid, and then when I didn’t see any fighting or anything I snuck into a tavern and listened, and I found out that General Terrek had just won a big battle, his retreat had just been a trick, and the Northerners weren’t coming. But I didn’t dare go back, then — I’d deserted in time of war, and that meant a death sentence. So I hid out in the mountains for three years, working my way north toward the Great Highway and sneaking down to get news sometimes,
and in 4996 the Northerners turned a whole army of demons loose and blasted General Terrek and the eastern territories into the Great Eastern Desert, and I thought we were all going to die after all, except it would be demons instead of Northerners, and they could probably find me no matter how well I hid and the love spell probably wouldn’t work on them. But then the gods themselves came and fought the demons off, and wiped out the Northerners, and the war was over, and I stopped worrying, and after awhile I stopped hiding. And I ran into Kalirin one day, and I thought he was going to kill me, but he didn’t care any more, he said that with the war over it didn’t matter, and there wasn’t any point in punishing me anyway, because of the spell. So I stopped hiding, but I didn’t have anywhere to go back to, so I just started traveling around the Small Kingdoms, mostly along the Great Highway.” She took a deep breath and concluded, “And I’ve been here ever since.”

  “And you used that love spell on someone anyway, even though there weren’t any more Northerners,” Kelder said, certain that Irith would have been unable to resist testing it out. He still didn’t see why she was so embarrassed and secretive about it, though.

  “On Ezdral, I bet,” Asha said.

  Kelder started. That idea, obvious as it now seemed, had not yet occurred to him; he threw Asha an astonished glance in response to her unexpected perspicacity, then looked back to Irith.

  The shapeshifter nodded. “That’s right,” she said. “I enchanted Ezdral.”

  “So that’s why he’s in love with you?” Kelder asked. “That’s why he’s been looking for you all these years?” The embarrassment and reticence suddenly made sense.

  Irith nodded unhappily.

  “Well, why didn’t you take the spell off when you left him, then?” Kelder asked.

  Irith stared at him in surprise.

  “Because I can’t, stupid!” she shouted. “I don’t know how! All I can do is put it on, not take it off!”

  This revelation left Kelder speechless.