Apprentice (10 page)

“When you fail to remember a star properly, the spells you attempt to cast will punish you worse than the punishment I will inflict upon you now. Reflect upon that.”

The wizard cast a spell on Benen and for two days, all physical touch brought pain: a jangling feeling down his nerves. It was a lot like the excruciating pain Benen had felt the only time he had cast a spell. From then on, he and Orafin studied and quizzed from all the previous volumes. Benen was surprised his head could hold all the information he was feeding it; he was only the son of a farmer, not a scholar. He developed pride in his newfound capability to learn and remember things. Orafin told him not to let it get to his head.

“There’s a lot more you’ll need to learn before we can take on the wizard.”

After all volumes on the stars were exhausted, the wizard began teaching Benen about actual spell casting.

“It has little to do with the mumbling of words or the movements of your arms, it’s all up here in your head,” the wizard said. As this was an interactive session, Benen was allowed to speak.

“But I’ve seen you incant and make arcane gestures,” he said to the wizard. He clearly remembered the wizard doing so on a few occasions; specifically, back in the village.

“Oh, I do use them when casting a spell I’m not as familiar with, but these are optional. If you know a spell well enough, you can simply focus on the stars you need, will what you want to happen, and channel power into the spell. The movements and the incantations are crutches to help you channel the power properly. Once you’re used to a spell, you can gradually let those become more and more minimal until eventually you forgo them altogether.

Spell casting requires a reservoir of power within the wizard; you do not have that yet. You will have to do the most simple spell possible over and over to acquire a small capacity for power. From there, growing your reservoir will not be so tedious.”

The wizard taught Benen a spell for making a tiny point of light on the tip of his finger. It used the sun so it was easy to visualize the stars involved and could be practised all day. Along with the specifics of the spell, the wizard taught Benen some incantation words that would help with sun casting. Similarly, he also taught him gestures for the same. This accomplished, the wizard moved to depart.

“You will practise this every moment the sun is up until you have mastered it. You will have no other duties but this. Take less than a month to do this and you will be rewarded.”

Benen practised the spell as directed, hiding in his rooms to do it. He felt silly making pompous wizardly gestures and speaking strange nonsense words and preferred to do it where the wizard was unlikely to run into him. Unfortunately for Benen, Orafin could not be so easily avoided. The rat laughed at his imprecise movements and incorrect pronunciation.

“Help me!” Benen told it, “don’t just laugh at me, you stupid useless rat!”

Orafin was more serious after this rebuke and tried to help Benen with his posture and movements. He helped with the pronunciation too, but his help there was less appreciated by Benen.

“No! No! No!” the rat would say. “It’s not Astifer like Az-tifer, it’s like ass; think Ass-tifer.”

If there was a way to make a pronunciation dirty, the rat would. He’d rhyme the sounds to female body parts, some Benen had never even heard of. In the end, it did help. After only one week, Benen could reliably create a point of light at the end of his finger. Better, he could do it without it being followed by exhaustion and excruciating pain.

“From this, you can easily make a light beam, Benen,” remarked Orafin, “or light a candle. The principles are mostly the same, as are the gestures. You will see that from small simple effects, you can extrapolate bigger spells. The wizard has finally begun to put you on the path to his own doom.”

Benen was feeling ambivalent about hurting the wizard since he had started getting proper lessons from him. He didn’t seem as bad now that he was actually teaching him. This changed when he proudly showed the wizard that he could reliably cast the point of light spell.

The wizard stood and watched Benen cast the spell over and over again, through an entire hour.

“It is a good start,” the wizard remarked. “Are you asserting that you have mastered the spell then?”

“Yes, Master,” Benen said, his chest swelling with pride.

The wizard asked to see Benen’s hand. The boy extended it and the wizard took it in his own. There followed intense pain in two of his fingers. He screamed and withdrew his hand from the wizard’s. He saw that two of his fingers were charred black husks, burned to the bone. As he lost consciousness from shock and pain he heard the wizard say:

“Now, cast the spell.”

He woke later to find his hand had been bandaged, presumably by Orafin. He could not feel the two fingers.

“They’re gone,” said the rat.

“Gone? Forever?” asked the boy with alarm.

“I’m afraid so. Unless you or another wizard learns enough of the right magic to regrow them. Don’t expect the wizard to do it for you though; this is his idea of a lesson.”

“How can I do magic without those fingers? They’re part of the spell I just learnt!”

“You will have to do without that part of the physical motion. You can do it, Benen.”

He had to work another week to get the spell working without the fingers. He waited another week beyond that, practising the spell even further, expecting the wizard to somehow prove to him he was not ready.

When he demonstrated for the wizard, Benen was forced to cast the spell over and over again for three hours without pause. Once this was completed, Benen thought he had finally succeeded, but then the wizard hit him in the face, hard.

“Cast the spell,” the wizard insisted as he hit again and again.

Benen could not do it. He returned to practising.

He had Orafin interfere with him in all possible ways they could think of together, the rat biting him on occasions, other times clawing at his face and eyes. It was only on the day before the deadline that Benen was ready. He could cast the spell silently, without motions, effortlessly. He could do so while being bitten or clawed. To further test him, Orafin even tried leaping straight at Benen’s crotch while he was casting; the boy was unfazed.

He proved all this to the wizard and, finally, the wizard had to concede that Benen had achieved mastery of the spell.

“As your reward, starting tomorrow, you will assist me in the laboratory,” pronounced the wizard.

Work in the laboratory, of course, was hardly a reward: it was more work on Benen’s plate. Worse, once Benen started being able to cast spells, the wizard reinstated his task of cleaning the tower. This meant that he would get up with the sun, clean and cook for twelve hours, then take lessons and work in the laboratory with the wizard for another six. He was exhausted by the time he returned to his quarters, but still found the energy most nights to take extra lessons from Orafin for two or three hours. This routine ran Benen ragged but he still persevered; he was motivated.

The more Benen worked in the laboratory, the more he felt used by the wizard. Every session started with instructions on how Benen was to assist, but they were always incomplete; missing a step or two. The missing parts always resulted in some discomfort or injury to Benen. It did motivate him to learn how the experiments worked, so that he could figure out the missing instruction. This was, he knew, the point. The wizard was teaching him, grudgingly, the basics of laboratory technique; he just wasn’t doing it in a nice way. Benen hardened his heart against the wizard, readying himself bit by bit for the day to come when he would be powerful enough to rise up against him.

But that day was still far away and for the moment he was becoming more of a wizard by the day. One morning, when Overseer came to take him on his rounds for the cleaning of the tower, Benen decided he had had enough of the cursed blue light. He looked up and verified the Cleaver had risen. This constellation, called the Scythe by the common folk, emanated energies wizards used to destroy things; including dispelling magical effects. Benen wasn’t sure he was powerful enough to dispel an effect the wizard had protected, but he doubted the Overseer was something the wizard had worked very hard upon; it was probably created with the least effort needed.

The blue light pulsed its impatience when he failed to rise immediately when called awake. He did rise then and looked at it.

“Are you conscious?” he asked it. “Are you a person?”

It did not seem to understand this line of enquiry and pulsed more quickly. Benen knew this as a sign that the construct was getting ready to shock him for not following orders. He concentrated on the nine stars of the Cleaver then, picturing them clearly in his mind. He knew all their masses, their visible magnitude, their distance from his own world as well as their distances from each other; he even knew their ages. Keeping this in mind, he drew upon his now slightly larger reservoir of magical energy and molded it into the spell he desired in his mind. Simultaneously, he began a circular motion with his right arm and moved his left hand up above his head, two fingers curled and two fully extended. Finally, he gave voice to incantation words that suited his magical intent: “Marbellus Inuut Kartan Vourt!”

The energies burned through him as he finished the spell; he was pushing his capabilities with this effect. A torrent of red energies flowed from him to the blue light. It emitted a piercingly high-pitched shriek for a brief second and then it was all over.

When Benen looked, the blue light was still there. His spell had failed!

The light pulsed quicker than usual, as though it were getting ready to deliver an exceptionally strong shock, but its pulsing suddenly ended. For a second, the light simply hung there, flickering intermittently, then it became blue glitter hanging in the air before falling to the ground.

I did it!
Benen thought. Then he truly felt his body’s pain at channelling the magical energies and he collapsed back into his bed. He slept again and did not get up until an hour before midday.

The wizard will kill me if I do not serve up lunch,
he thought immediately. He made his way to the kitchens and made the wizard’s meal. Having fulfilled this obligation, Benen then had to clean the tower with only half the time he normally had. The thought occurred to him then that perhaps he’d been doing this the wrong way.

He was a wizard’s apprentice; why was he cleaning with a brush, bucket, and broom?

Benen knew the Cleaver would still be in the sky and that he could call upon its energies to create his own equivalent of the blue light Overseer. His creation would be a scourge, travelling the entire tower, disintegrating dust, spills, and vermin, but he feared such a thing would be beyond his current capacity to cast without severely harming himself; the simple dispel from that morning had wiped him out for half the day.

What I need is something that makes the going easier and faster,
he thought.

He settled on an idea and took out a rag as the target for his spell. He called once more upon the Cleaver and its energies. For this he needed different movements and incantation words, but he knew them. The spell he was casting should be even easier than the previous one from the morning. This was a good thing because he did not have the time to waste recuperating from this spell.

He concentrated on the spell, made the movements, said the words and enchanted the rag.

The surge of pain through Benen was less than one tenth that of the dispelling magic’s aftershock. He felt all right; not perfect, but functional. He also felt pride in his growing abilities.

I am becoming a wizard!
he exulted.

Picking up the rag, he was surprised by a tingling sensation where he touched it. He could see the magic’s effect on his hand; it was cleaner than ever before. Using the rag, one wipe was all it took to clean a surface perfectly. Benen quickly wiped down floors and surfaces and was finished cleaning the day’s rooms in half the time he had left. With the rag, he could do his cleaning in a quarter of the time it would normally require. His heart swelled with happiness that he would have this extra time to work on his magic. Seeing such obvious benefits to his new powers motivated Benen to learn most of all.

The trick with the rag meant more to Benen than simply shortening his cleaning time, giving him more time to learn; it brought a realization that magic was something he could use for all tasks, if he had the right knowledge.

He applied this new attitude to his work in the kitchen.

When the time came to cook the wizard’s lunch, Benen thought of how magic could be used to help with the chore. The most obvious assistance it could provide was as a replacement for the hearth. He could use fire magic to heat the food and cook it in a mere fraction of the time it would normally take, but he wanted to do more with magic. Benen felt sure the wizard did everything with his magic and that this attitude was key to becoming a great magician.

Using the Pinnacle constellation, Benen knew he should be able to cast a spell to manipulate objects at a distance with his mind. He knew he didn’t need a powerful spell for this; the wizard used the Pinnacle’s magic to make the tower fly, but the heaviest object Benen needed to lift with this spell was a chicken. He had learnt all he needed about the constellation itself and knew some of the proper words and motions for spells of this sort, so he decided he would give it a try.