The Oathbound Wizard

by Christopher Stasheff

  The dragon tipped its wings, rocking from side to side, and wheeled away, back into the mountains. "We are espied, Majesty," Sauvignon said in his clear, rich tenor.

  It sent thrills up her spine, as Matthew's voice once had. But she kept her face impassive and returned, "Espied by friends, my Lord Marquis—for any who fight for their freedom must needs be enemies of Ibile, and Ibile's enemies are our friends."

  "May they, then, seek out word of the enemy for us?" His tone was hopeful.

  "They may," Alisande answered. "But look you, milord, these are not our minions to command, but allies to be asked."

  "Brave and valiant allies," the young man murmured.

  Alisande hoped he was right.

  CHAPTER 13

  The Burning Stake

  Friends are friends, so the atmosphere couldn't stay chilly forever. On the other hand, it didn't have to become warm and cozy, either. The conversation gleamed with a veneer of great politeness throughout the meal. Matt could understand—it after all, he was the one who had made the crass, unbelievably basic mistake that had endangered them all. So, under the circumstances, he was more than glad to volunteer for the first watch. He was even gladder when his friends had rolled up in their blankets and left him to his vigil. The coals glowed on their blanket-wrapped forms, and the sound of deep, even breathing filled the air, punctuated by the occasional snore from Fadecourt.

  Peace began to fill Matt's soul, or at least calmness; he felt his spirit filling with the elation of the star-filled canopy above him. The stillness of the night was soothing, only the sounds of nature about him, proceeding with their even rhythm. Even the shadowed, looming wall of the forest, bulking dark against the sky, seemed only the vandalism of a petulant child.

  Narlh, however, was a little more suspicious of that tranquility, and its effects on Matt—especially as he saw the wizard's gaze drift to the wand lying beside him. When Matt picked it up and started gazing at it, the dracogriff decided it was time for action. He cleared his throat and growled, "You sure you want to take the first watch?"

  Fadecourt looked up at the sound of the dracogriff's voice, instantly alert. Even Yverne lifted her head—under the circumstances, she wasn't sleeping too soundly, either.

  "Yeah, sure I'm sure." Matt waved Narlh away without looking; his eyes were on the three-foot stick across his knees.

  Narlh gave him a doubtful glance, but curled back up on his side of the fire. Yverne and Fadecourt, however, were not quite so sanguine. She looked up from her pine-bough bed to exchange a glance with him where he lay on the grass.

  "Does he know the wielding of a wand?" Yverne asked. "For surely, if he does not, he could bring down disaster on all our heads."

  "He is a wizard of experience," Fadecourt answered, "yet I share your misgivings." He turned to Matt and called out, "Ho, Lord Matthew! Dost'a know aught of magic wands?"

  "Something," Matt answered, his eyes still on the stick. "Where I come from, magicians wave them around as part of the spell." He didn't mention that the magicians in question were illusionists, or that the wands were only there to call the audience's attention away from what the magician was really doing. "And I've read stories in which the magicians made `mystic passes' with them—I assume that meant gestures that somehow reinforced the spell."

  Fadecourt and Yverne exchanged a glance that said their misgivings had been confirmed. " 'Tis not that, Lord Matthew," the lady said, turning back to him. " 'Tis simply that, when the wizard casts a spell at someone, he points the wand at that person, and the spell is made far stronger."

  Matt stared, his eyes losing focus, as he tried to remember what he'd seen during the magic fight. "That's right—the sorcerer didn't gesture with the wand. He just held it straight up until the last few syllables of the spell, then snapped it down as if he were a fisherman casting."

  "Nay." Yverne frowned. " 'Tis a wand, not a net."

  "I meant an angler, not a commercial fish-harvester." Matt looked up, frowning. "You sure there's no chance this thing is dedicated to evil?"

  Fadecourt spread his hands. "You are the wizard, not we. Yet surely, if it were, you would feel its malice in your hands."

  Matt nodded slowly. "That's true, and I don't really feel anything in it, except maybe a residue of nastiness. But I should be able to clear that out with a magical cleansing spell."

  "Take it away from us when you do, I pray you," Fadecourt said hastily.

  "Don't worry, I'm not about to do anything with it until I have a fairly good idea of how it works." Matt shook his head.

  "But I don't see how it could make a spell stronger. I mean, once I conjured up a horde of insects, and they came from all four quarters of the sky. How could I have pointed the wand at them when they came from everywhere?"

  Yverne was staring. "You truly summoned a plague of locusts?"

  "Bugs, anyway." Matt squirmed, uncomfortable with the awe in her eyes. "Another time, I had to alter the weather a little, summon up a storm—and, of course, I had to control it. How could a wand help with that? I mean, a storm covers the whole sky, so a wand..."

  "I have no idea," she said, shaken. "I have told you all that I can—yet me thinks 'twas no need, if you are so puissant a wizard as that. By your leave, I'll retire." And she beat a hasty retreat back to her brush pile.

  Fadecourt stayed long enough to shake his head. "And I had dared to counsel you! Your pardon, Lord Wizard."

  "Oh, no, I appreciate your help! I mean, it's not as though I had spent a lifetime studying magic, you know. I had to pick it up quickly, and I'm sure there are still a lot of holes in my knowledge."

  "I cannot patch them, then," the cyclops said. "Great or little, your knowledge of magic far exceeds my own. Nay, in future I'll stick to my boulders. Good even, Lord Matthew." And he turned away to find himself a nice soft patch of grass.

  Matt stared after him, frowning, feeling somehow guilty. He certainly hadn't meant to hurt their feelings, or to make them feel small. He was just being honest—but of course, admitting that he didn't really know what he was doing wasn't exactly going to inspire confidence in people who were depending on him. Besides, though he hadn't been studying magic his whole life, he had been studying the controls for it, without knowing it—literature. He had become a student, though somewhat reluctantly, in elementary school—and Miss Grind, in junior high, had practically killed his love for poetry by forcing his class to read syrupy sentiments by minor versifiers and telling her students they were great. But Mr. Luce and Miss Soleil, in high school, had restored his wonder at the old songs, and a couple of his college professors had helped him to understand the new ones: The rest, at least, he had suffered in silence; their subject matter redeemed their teaching. His whole advantage, against the sorcerers in Merovence, had come from his knowing great poetry that they hadn't known.

  Well, no, not just from that. To be fair, a lot of his advantage had come from being able to analyze the workings of magic methodically—being able to ask, "How does that work?" and figure out an answer.

  And how had he done his figuring? Well, by the scientific method, really—observation, formulation of hypothesis, experimentation, revision, and conclusion. And where had he learned that? From that wonderful ninth-grade science teacher, and from the other science courses he'd been forced to take in high school and college. No, in a manner of speaking, he'd have to say that he'd been studying the background material for Merovence's magic longer than he had known—which was why he'd been able to learn it so quickly here.

  So apply it all again. He'd figured out how magic worked in Merovence with nothing but his own observations to help him. Later on, he'd refined that knowledge with a lot of helpful hints people had given him—but he'd figured out his first purposeful spell on his own.

  If he could have done it then, he could do it now. Okay—apply the scientific method to a fantastic object. Figure out how the magic wand worked...

  On the other side of the fire, Narlh eyed Matt war
ily. He could tell from the way the wizard was staring at the smooth stick that he wasn't going to be paying any attention to anything else all evening. Silently, and without Matthew noticing, Narlh uncurled and started prowling. So the wizard would take first watch? Big deal. So Narlh would watch the wizard—and anything else that came up.

  His back being guarded without his knowing it, Matt studied the wand, trying to apply the scientific method to magic. After all, it was a method for solving problems, any problems that produced symptoms, which could show the way to a possible solution, which could in turn be checked by experiment.

  Okay. First: observation.

  Well, Matt had observed that the wand was used, and he had seen and felt the result when it was pointed at him—but the consequences weren't noticeably different from those of any other spells he'd experienced. Of course, they were presumably stronger than they would have been without the wand—but maybe it had just been amplifying the magic of a very weak sorcerer.

  Amplifier? No, certainly a stick of wood couldn't function as an amplifier.

  But the idea did catch at Matt's attention, at least enough to make an analogy between magic and electronics—and he moved into the next step of the scientific method: hypothesizing. After all, electromagnetism was a field force, and from what Matt felt when he worked a spell, so was magic. Here in Ibile, the feeling of some sort of force gathering all about him was almost suffocating. If the analogy held, the field force could be channeled into a directional force.

  Was that what the wand did?

  Yes, of course! It was the "antenna" for the "transmission" of magic—and a spell converted the field force into a form that could be "modulated," formed, by a human mind! That modulated force could be radiated in all directions, which was what Matt had been doing—"broadcasting" magical energy. But the wand made the transmission directional, like a parabolic dish concentrating electromagnetic microwaves into a beam. Or like those sharp points of static electricity he once saw in the college laboratory, in his one required lab science course. If that was right, then the wand certainly wouldn't have been useful for summoning a horde of insects, controlling the weather, or anything in which the magic needed to affect everything in sight, in all directions.

  Was that why some magicians used gestures, "mystic passes"—for the more general spells? Maybe the sawing of the air did do some good, after all—Matt had imagined it was just sort of an aid to concentration, or a way of boosting self-belief in the magic-worker's own power. But words were symbols, and it was those symbols that modulated, manipulated, the magical field. As Matt had recently proved, just thinking the symbols was enough, if you concentrated on making things happen through them—but for most people, himself included, it was easier to concentrate when you spoke aloud, which was why he had paced his room muttering to himself when he studied for exams. And why, come to think of it, magicians could write books of spells without making natural cataclysms erupt while they were writing—by deliberately not speaking the verses aloud, they'd been choosing to have the spells be ineffective. He'd noticed himself that a poem would concentrate a magical field about him, but that it couldn't discharge unless he put some sort of imperative at the end of the verse. If his analogy to electronics held, the verse accumulated and modulated that field, as a power amplifier increased the strength of a signal and a transmitter modulated it—but the completed radio wave couldn't go anywhere if you didn't route it into the antenna. The imperative at the end of the verse was like pressing the "transmit" button on a CB transceiver. The imperative, the command, was a matter of willing the spell to effect its results.

  But if Matt had been broadcasting spells like a spark-gap transmitter, no wonder every wizard and sorcerer within range had suddenly known there was a strange magician in his territory! They'd picked him up, loud and clear.

  Which was probably why the Ibilian sorcerers used wands—so that they could keep the king from knowing what they were doing. Of course, it also made spells more powerful, by making them more directional—so as Matt used the wand, it would direct the discharge of magic into a much smaller area, and there wouldn't be any spillover for King Gordogrosso to pick up.

  The wand could let Matt work magic without letting the king and his noblemen know Matt was there. Also, by concentrating a field into a beam, it should make the spells much more powerful. Of course, this would only work for a spell that was supposed to happen in a very small area. It wouldn't do any good for fighting a whole army, as Matt had once infected a whole host of besiegers with salmonella, or for anything else that was supposed to apply to everything in the vicinity—but most spells were directed at specific people or things, anyway. With the wand, Matt wouldn't have worried that pushing the rock off Narlh's tail might alert the local magical gendarmes.

  If the wand worked as Matt was guessing.

  Hypothesizing, rather—he wasn't guessing blind; he had some data to build on.

  Okay. The hypothesis was complete—but it was based on an analogy that might not really fit the actual situation. If the two forces only seemed to be analogous, but weren't really so, then the hypothesis would be wrong.

  Only one way to find out—test it. Experiment—the third step in the scientific method.

  What to try?

  Matt looked about him and spied a boulder that Fadecourt had brought over for the fire ring, then found to be too large and tossed away. It was about two feet in diameter, and the cyclops had only tossed, not pitched, so it was only about twenty feet outside Matt's guarding circle. He stared at it and recited a quick rock-moving verse.

  "Roll down, roll down the meadow!

  You must roll o'er the meadow.

  Roll out and o'er the meadow,

  Whether you be young or old."

  He felt the familiar gathering of forces, thickened, oppressive, and pushed back against them with sheer willpower—but not very hard; just a little harder than they pressed in. He only wanted the rock to move a little bit, not become a perpetual motion machine, as the one he'd pushed off Narlh's wing had.

  The rock stirred, then moved a little to the right, rolled back, moved a little farther to the left, rolled back and a little farther to the right—and, rocking back and forth, finally boosted itself up over its own shallow bowl, past the rim, and lumped itself over and over for about two feet, then came to rest. This time, there was no slope to keep it going. Matt nodded—all had proceeded as he had expected. So much for the control; now for the experiment. He introduced the variable—the wand. A moment of whimsy seized him, and he decided really to introduce the variable. "Rock," he muttered, "this is the wand. Wand, this is the rock."

  The wand bobbed, and the stone wobbled.

  Matt felt his hair try to stand on end. There was more power here than he'd realized! He summoned composure, pointed the stick at the stone, and recited the exact same verse again.

  The boulder jumped into the air, landed, and jumped again—but only half as high—and went bouncing away toward the forest. It really was rolling, too—but the rolling was happening mostly in the air.

  Matt's heart soared. Hypothesis validated! Now, if he tried a dozen or a hundred times and got the same results on every occasion, he could include it in the theory of magic he was developing. By necessity.

  Enough gloating. He couldn't take the chance that the boulder might keep on rolling forever—that was what he'd been trying to avoid when he performed the control experiment. Matt pointed the wand in the direction of the rolling rock and tried to remember the verse he'd used to stop the stone that had gone rolling down the mountainside.

  Before he could get it out, he heard the crash of snapping brush, a howl of pain, and several loud baritone voices cursing.

  He'd hurt somebody! Quickly, he snapped out,

  "Sisyphus, you've gone too far.

  Stop your heaving where you are!

  Then rock, stop rolling! Stand you still,

  And so your destiny fulfill!"

  The crashing
stopped, and the cursing went on. It finally occurred to Matt to wonder who'd been skulking in his underbrush.

  "Up!" Narlh shouted. "Enemies to the northwest! And they might not be alone!"

  Fadecourt was on his feet before the dracogriff finished, blinking as he looked about him, crouched, arms spread to fight. Yverne was lifting her head, blinking sleep out of her eyes.

  Matt suddenly remembered that he was supposed to be the sentry. He leaped to his feet, shouting, "Fadecourt, up! Fear! Foes! Fight!"

  "I am awake," the cyclops snapped. "Yet where is the foe?"

  "In the trees." Narlh hissed, wings spreading dark against the night, and Yverne rose with a single, sinuous motion that was so graceful Matt caught his breath for a moment, gazing, before he turned to follow Fadecourt toward the chevaux-defrise, drawing his sword. As an afterthought, he called back softly, "Yverne! Watch the back, the other side of the circle! You never know, they might try to outflank us!"

  Hooves filled the night with drumming, and boots rolled under them. Then a war cry cut loose, and a score of footmen dashed out of the trees and hit the barricade. Matt quailed inside, but his body was already running toward the attackers, because Fadecourt was smashing into the front rank as they struggled between the pointed stakes, and Matt was hanged if he'd let the cyclops show him up. Besides, Narlh was right behind him, so he drew his dagger to make it look good and yelled back. Leaping forward he struck a halberd spinning from a soldier's hand. It flipped up into the night, and Matt's heart jammed into his throat, hoping it wouldn't hit Yverne. He risked a quick look back and saw he'd almost been right—it had spun straight toward her! But the frail, vulnerable damsel stepped aside adroitly and caught the halberd by the middle of its shaft. Then it went on spinning, but by her intention—she brandished it over her head, whirling it about two-handed, and charged into the fray with a scream that chilled Matt's blood.