Apprentice (6 page)

He was disturbed out of his thoughts and self-pity by a feeling creeping up his foot and then his leg. It felt like a small creature, walking up his body. A primal sort of fear of the unknown drove Benen to shake himself and get up. As he got out of bed, he took the covers and shook them. A small brown shape was thrown by his efforts, to roll along the floor until it came to a rest. It was a rat. A large, brown rat. Something was not quite right with it. It had many patches of fur missing, as well as the eye and ear on its right side. It looked like a rat that had gone through a war and barely survived.

“What did you do that for!?” squeaked out the rat.

Benen was startled to hear it speak.

Am I losing my mind? I’ve not been on my hunger strike long enough to be hallucinating, have I?

The rat righted itself and looked accusingly at Benen with its one good eye.

“I come here to help you and that’s how you treat me?” it accused him.

“Uh, what?” was all Benen managed to say back.

The rat padded closer and stood before Benen, within easier speaking range. It stood up onto its two back legs and stayed that way, becoming a biped and making it seem the most natural thing in the world.

Definitely hallucinating,
thought Benen.

“Oh, you’re not hallucinating, my fine young friend,” the rat contradicted Benen’s thought. “I am here to help you.”

“You read my mind!” Benen accused it.

“Yes, that’s an easy trick for someone who knows magic, you know,” it said back.

“But you’re a rat!”

“I wasn’t always a rat, that’s for sure.”

“Really?”

“Really.” Benen was still not convinced of the rat’s reality, but he was so lonely that anyone who wanted to be friendly was all right with him. He sat on the bed to calm himself, then remembered what the rat had said.

“You came to help me? How?”

“I’ll teach you magic. And later, I’ll help you kill the wizard.”

“Kill the wizard?” Benen thought this impossible.

“Yes, but not for a long time. You have to be trained first. We’ll do it together. You’ll see, my little friend.”

“Wait. You said you weren’t always a rat. If that’s true, what were you before?” Benen asked.

“I was the wizard’s apprentice before you.” it told him.

Is this my fate too?
Benen thought with horror.

“No,” the rat answered his thought, “you, he’ll kill. That’s what he tried to do to me. I barely survived.”

“By becoming a rat?” Benen said, confused.

“Yes. He had summoned a horde of rats to eat me alive, near the end of the duel. That’s how I lost my eye and ear. I thought fast and transformed into a rat and lost myself in the rat horde.”

“That’s quick thinking for someone being eaten by rats,” commented Benen.

“I’m quick on my feet. Doubly so now that I have four of them.”

The rat’s success was evident by his being still alive in front of Benen, but he found it difficult to believe that anyone could think while being eaten alive.

“That’s exactly the sort of thing you have to learn, my friend. And exactly what I can teach you,” the rat continued to surprise Benen by responding to his thoughts.

“But the wizard is killing me now!” Benen protested.

“No. You’re killing yourself by refusing to play his sick games,” the rat insisted.

“I can’t do what he asked,” Benen thought of the knife and cutting himself with it. Worse, he knew he would have to learn each constellation the same way.

“The wizard doesn’t brook disobedience, but he does admire initiative. If you don’t like the option he’s chosen for you, show some spunk and initiative instead of letting him kill you.”

“But how?” Benen had no idea what he could do that would garner any respect from the wizard.

“Well, the wizard offered you two other choices. Go and do one of them the hard way. Maybe he’ll respect you for it.”

Benen thought back to the three items on the marble slab back in the wizard’s study. He had chosen the wood chisel, but the wizard had told him his choice didn’t matter and given him the knife.

“Do you know what I would have had to do if I was allowed to use the wood chisel? Would I carve the star patterns on wooden planks?” he asked the rat.

“Yes, exactly.”

“But it’s hopeless, I don’t have the chisel or any wood,” Benen complained. He slumped and his face fell.

“I can teach you a charm to solve this problem,” the rat told him. “You’ll find that with me as your ally, problems are just opportunities for a new lesson in magic.”

Benen began to feel hope again. He got up and went to his knees before the rat, bending down to put his face near it.

“What’s your name? I’m Benen,” he said to the rat from this more intimate distance.

“Hello Benen, I’m Orafin,” the rat replied. Benen and the rat shook paw and hand as best they could.

“Partners?” asked Benen.

“Partners. I’ll get you through this, teach you the magic the wizard would be too stingy to teach you and, when the time is right, we’ll kill the old bastard,” there was much venom in the tone used by the rat.

He really hates the wizard,
Benen thought.

“Indeed I do,” replied the rat. “There is nothing I want more than to see him killed, preferably in as slow and painful a way as possible.”

It was understandable. Benen reasoned he’d also want to kill someone who had tried to kill him.

Their agreement settled, the two worked at getting Benen ready to face the Overseer and then the wizard.

The rat, Orafin, taught Benen his first true lesson on magic and the use of it.

“The first thing you should know is that magic is governed by the celestial bodies. They shine down their power upon the field of magic down here, below them. The field, without their light, has no use of its own. Flavoured, so to speak, by the celestial light, the field can be used for the specific magic governed by the different constellations and other bodies. This means that only magic of the right type for the currently shining stars, sun, moon and planets, can be used. We’re in luck that the constellation governing the magic we need tonight is in the sky.”

Benen had to agree with Orafin. He shuddered at the thought that it might well have been otherwise.

“The constellation wizards call the Trickster is the one we’ll be using.”

With the rat touching him, Benen was able to see the stars above, right through the intervening materials. When Orafin pointed out which stars formed the Trickster, Benen saw that it was composed from parts of two constellations he knew separately: the Stool and the Weather-vane. He could see the man’s form the constellation was supposed to describe.

“The Trickster is used for a lot of changing magic. Shape-shifting is what it’s used for the most, but it can also be used to mold and shape other things, which is what we’ll be using it for. If you were more powerful, you could change something to wood and change its form directly as you wished. But right now you don’t even have any capacity to take in or store power on your own.”

“How do I get that though?” Benen interrupted before the rat could continue.

“You get capacity by doing more and more magic. The less capacity you have, the easier it is to built it up. Each magical effect you cast will bring up your capacity by a tiny bit. There is a very simple spell to light a candle that can be performed with the tiny sliver of potential you currently have. It would be extremely difficult for you to successfully do it and would take months of practise and work to manage, but you would eventually be able to hold enough magic for our purposes tonight.”

“But we don’t have that sort of time!” cried Benen in alarm.

“Exactly, so we’ll use a short cut,” said the rat with a very human-seeming smile on its ratty face.

“What sort of short cut?” asked Benen, unsure what this could mean.

“I’ll provide the power and you will do the magic. This way, you’ll grow your reservoir faster and more reliably,” Orafin told him.

“Oh, that sounds okay.”

The rat said nothing further on the subject, instead it started looking about the room for something.

“We need a piece of wood, one that is large enough to hold the pattern of the stars and is not attached to anything you can’t pry it off of,” the rat said.

Benen immediately knew what he could use, “There are cutting boards in the kitchen, I could use one of those, right?”

“That should work, but the wizard will likely be angry you used one of his cutting boards. Is there anything here, something the wizard has placed here for your own use that you could use?”

Benen thought for a few minutes then worked at the back of the chair that went with his work desk. The planks there were too securely attached. He kept looking around, casting about for anything that might do the trick. He’d almost given up until a trip to make water revealed the solution to him. The loo had a wooden plank that served as cover for the hole. He came back proudly displaying his find.

“But what will cover the loo? Won’t it get smelly in here for you?” asked Orafin.

“I’ll find something else to cover it,” said Benen vaguely.

“It’s your problem, I guess. That is a good piece of wood for our purposes, though.”

“Okay, what do we do with it?”

“You will begin by putting it down and sitting on the ground cross-legged in front of it.”

Benen did as asked and the rat came to stand in front of him. The boy leaned in closer to the rat, the better to hear it.

“You will need to learn the pattern of the stars for the Trickster first.”

“But I already know it, you showed it to me earlier,” Benen protested.

“You
saw
it earlier and you
remember
the pattern, but you don’t
know
it.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Well, tell me, how far apart are each of the stars? Which is the brightest of the stars? Are any of them binary stars?”

“Bi-what?”

“I think my point is now evident.”

Benen spent the next few hours learning and memorizing the properties and disposition of all the stars in the Trickster constellation. He was surprised to find out that the Trickster’s belt, which had two stars, really consisted of a star and a nebula. Of course, Orafin had to teach him what a nebula was first.

“This is a lot of information to keep straight,” Benen complained.

“Oh, this is just scratching the surface, my young friend,” the rat explained. “You will want to know much more about the Trickster constellation and its components before you ever attempt more magic using it. Only desperation drives us to use it now, without proper knowledge in your head first.”

“Why is this so important?” Benen asked.

“Without proper knowledge of the celestial bodies used in your spell, you’ll kill yourself in the casting,” the rat told him. “As it is, you will likely be quite hurt from doing this. This is appropriate though, given that you are supposed to have managed this on your own out of desperation to avoid the knife.”

“I’m afraid,” Benen admitted. His hands were shaking and he felt faint.

“Don’t worry, it won’t be so bad,” the rat reassured him. “It will burn in your head and nerves, you will probably have a bit of a seizure and vomit. After that you’ll be all right.”

Benen did not feel reassured, but he
was
desperate.

It probably won’t be worse than being shocked into unconsciousness by Overseer,
he told himself.

“Okay, I guess I know what I can for now about the Trickster, what about the rest of the spell?”

“That’s almost all of it; the rest is will, intention and mitigation,” said the rat.

“Miti-what?” asked Benen.

“Reducing the damages. When you see a wizard speak an incantation or make movements with his hands, he’s trying to reduce the pain and damage to himself from the spell. The movements that work for different constellations are very specific and you won’t be able to learn that now. I’ll give you an incantation for the spell, but you will almost certainly mispronounce it, so it will be of only minor value. Feel free to flail about with your arms and fingers when you do cast, there’s no harm in trying for luck a bit.”

Wizardry seemed awfully complicated, now that Benen was actually learning some. He wished the wizard was a better teacher so he didn’t have to do this spell now, so unprepared.

Next, Orafin taught Benen the short incantation and had him commit it to memory by repeating it over and over. This accomplished, they were ready to try the spell.

“Remember your intention too,” the rat cautioned. “you only want your fingers to be able to mold the wood and that only for a short time.” Benen nodded. Asking for too much would kill him, so the rat had told him.

Benen put out his hand for the rat. Orafin climbed into it and Benen deposited the rat onto his shoulder. They needed to be in contact for Orafin to provide the power Benen would be using for the spell.