Jake's Quest - Wizards V (16 page)

I heard Lana laughing and increased my pace to catch up with her. I found her in an extraordinary room.

She had illuminated ancient globes that hung from the ceiling. The room was hot and steamy from water flowing through a large swimming pool. There must be a hot spring below us. Magic had created the room’s stone structure, which was smooth as glass and had no breaks. Statues, painted in lifelike colors were forever frozen in mid sex act.

“We could blend right in,” Lana said as I put my arm around her.

I stepped forward to examine a woman on her back with a man on top.

“The detail is extraordinary. You can see every line of weave in the cloth she’s lying on.”

Lana bent to look. I stood back and looked at the room using magic sight.

“We have to leave.” I found it difficult to keep the panic out of my voice.

“Why? All these statues are turning me on, and we can go swimming too.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted her to know. But we had to leave. “Look at them magically.”

Lana laughed, but then her face paled as she followed my suggestion.

“These are real people turned to stone, just for decoration.” Her voice was little more than a whisper.

I started to drag her away.

“You told me once you changed a king back who’d been turned to stone.”

Had I told her that story? Possibly, you have to talk about something after sex.

“We should leave.” I noticed for the first time that there were child statues in this room. I wanted to be sick.

“You can change them back, Jake.”

I pulled her out of the room and didn’t stop dragging her until we were outside and in daylight.

“You don’t think you can do it?” she asked.

“It was supposed to be impossible, and he had only been stone for a few seconds.”

“But you could try?” Lana put a hand on me.

“What if they come back dead?” Would that put their deaths on my hands? There were so many deaths I was already accountable for.

“Would you want to be on display like that forever? Someone will find them sooner or later and use them as decoration. I would rather be properly dead and buried.”

I sat down and considered my options.

The sun was going down. We’d been gone for the whole day and walked back into the amphitheater, hand in hand.

“Where have you two been? We have been looking everywhere for you.” Professor Delor sounded furious. Behind her, Esta looked even angrier. Her eyes locked on Lana, sure of what we had been doing.

“We found some people…” Lana said. “They were turned to stone.”

I waved and the first of one hundred and four men, women, and children I’d rescued from the swimming pool room stepped into view. They were naked and very frightened, but they were alive.

27.
              
Magic

Esta was waiting for me outside the lecture theatre the following morning. Her face was pale and determined and I knew she was going to confront me.

“You were with Lana last night.” Her voice sounded like cracking ice.

“You’ve always known I have a relationship with her.”

“It’s her or me, Jake.” She bit her lip as if expecting me to discard Lana at this ultimatum. I liked both of them and couldn’t see why I had to make a choice. Being doubly married didn’t seem to bother either of them.

“As you wish. I’m not telling Lana to go away.”

I was feeling guilty in any case. I had wives and a mistress to be loyal to and I hadn’t been doing a very good job. Losing Esta would mean a lessening of guilt, though I would miss her company.

“So that’s it? Just like that?”

“We can still be friends.”

Her eyes widened, much like the time I’d suggested the three of get together in bed. Women, who can understand them?

“You are no better than the wizards who destroyed Tandon. Treating every woman you meet as a toy to be disposed of when she no longer suits you.”

She walked past me into the lecture theatre. I stared after her wondering what had brought that on. She had just got rid of me, not the other way round.

The lecture was part of a course on the fundamentals of magic. I’d learnt a lot about how and why spells worked. It turned out that magic could remember structures, sort of like jelly that had been set in a mold. A spell was the mold and depending on the things you built in, could last for a long time or no time at all. For the first time I knew what the factors were and how to manage them. One important rule was that the stronger the magic used the harder it was to keep it stable.

Mage Capell was our lecturer. He was a likeable young man who tended to find everything funny. He grinned at us as we sat down.

“What is magic?” he asked and the students suddenly found the notes in front of them incredibly interesting.

“Wizard Morrissey?”

Why pick on me? Oh well, I might as well give it a go.

“Magic flows throughout the multiverse and can be used to do things.”

A few muted giggles wafted through the room. Even Mage Capell smiled.

“That is what it does, not what it is.”

“It is an invisible energy,” Esta said. She turned to glare at me.

“Better, but it is more than just invisible.”

“It can only interact with the real world when a mind controls it.” Pitre said from the front row. She was the course swat. Always quoting books no one else had bothered to read.

Capell positively glowed with happiness. “Yes. It can only operate through the mind.”

“I’ve been told that seeds can’t germinate in the absence of magic. Seeds don’t have a mind.”

From the loud laughter that followed I knew I should have kept my mouth shut.

Capell smiled sadly at me. “That cannot be proven because it is impossible to remove magic from any part of the multiverse. It can be constrained in action, reduced in intensity, but it can never be totally blocked out.”

Tell that to the Fedre,
I thought, but did not choose to say it out loud. They had put me in such a space using technology.

Capell continued on the subject.

“The Elves believe that magic and life are two sides of the same coin. But then the Elves are hardly objective observers. They let their religion dictate how they see the multiverse. While the technological worlds take little interest in magic at all, or sometimes try to pretend that it doesn’t exist.”

“There are empires that are a mix of magic and technology,” I offered.

Capell nodded. “Some civilizations make use of magic as though it was a technology, especially for transport, such as using chain bridges. But I know of none that hold magic and technology in equal esteem.”

“The Progenitors?” I suggested.

More laughter from the other students, this time much louder.

“Hedge wizards think they know everything,” Pitre said in a stage whisper, “When most of them can’t tie their own shoelaces without assistance.”

Capell laughed, “No one knows who the Progenitors are, Wizard Morrissey. But I think it highly unlikely they use any technology at all. They are far too advanced for that.”

I gave up. For all their understanding of magic, the Balmack Accord was notably ignorant in certain areas.

“Magic is the left over energy from the creation of the multiverse,” Capell continued. “Unused potential if you will. All living things interact with it to some extent, but only a small number of people can store and direct any quantity of it with purpose. The Balmack Accord tests its children for magic capability and those with sufficient ability are trained in school. The most powerful of them come to train at the university when they are older.”

Over the weeks I’d been here I’d scanned the students and lecturers. Only a few were as powerful as Lana or Esta. None of them were as powerful as Urda or Bronwyn, not even those with the title Mage or Archmage. Maybe that was why they welcomed hedge wizards to the Accord through the university, to improve the breeding stock.

However, I had learnt that power and control are very different things and suspected that all the university Mages could take me in a fight. They had access to sophisticated weapons, which was all a spell was in the end.

Jeram was waiting for me outside the lecture theatre.

“Jake, that was an amazing thing you did with those people, changing them back from statues.”

I shrugged, because there was nothing to say. If he had seen them return to flesh, he would know it had been highly embarrassing for all concerned and I had to strip the compulsions from their minds just to get them to stop what they were doing.

“Take me with you on your next adventure. I have expertise you will need.”

“I don’t plan to do these things, they just happen to me.”

“Nevertheless, will you take me with you, if you can?”

I liked Jeram, but I didn’t understand why he would want to get involved in one of my messes. No one in their right mind would. One the other hand, it seemed important to him.

“If I get the chance, I will invite you along.”

Jeram smiled and gave me a small bow. “Thank you, Wizard Morrissey.” He turned and walked back the way we had come.

Chancellor Landow caught up with me further down the corridor.

“Wizard Morrissey, we have to talk.”

Apart from being out of breath, the one thing that struck me about the Chancellor was that he had toned down his condescension. I stopped and waited for him to get his breath back.

“We have found more petrified humans in the palace.”

I wasn’t sure what that had to do with me. The University was awash with Mages who could deal with them.

“We would like you to teach us how to restore them.”

Okay, scratch that idea, which still left a big problem.

“I don’t really know how I do it. It’s not like normal magic. Surely you have some expert who knows?”

The Chancellor did not take the news well.

“We have lost a victim trying.”

“If a mage was touching me while I did it, he might learn from me.”

The Chancellor’s face brightened. “That would be excellent. Take my hand.”

We hopped into a large brightly lit room, empty except for statues and three people in brightly colored robes, two men and a woman. Someone had draped sheets over the more obscene of the statues.

The Chancellor let go of my hand and called to the others.

“I have brought Wizard Morrissey. He tells me he does not know how to teach the magic, but that we can observe him while he performs it.”

The woman snorted. “How can he be unable teach us? All magic techniques can be learned by touch.” She had a soured wrinkled face and looked older than Methuselah.

I shrugged. “You can hold onto me when I do it, if you want.”

She appraised me top to toe, the way someone might assess horseflesh. Then she nodded. “That will be satisfactory.”

From the way the others reacted it was easy to tell she was the boss.

“I am Grand Mage Matha,” she said. “Restore the child for me and we should be able to restore the others.”

I looked at her with magical sight and was stunned. She was the most powerful wizard I had ever seen, short of the Diabli. She might even give them a run for their money in a fair fight.

I looked where she had waved. A small petrified girl looking sweet and innocent waited a few feet beyond her hand. She had her hands clasped in front of her, as if pleading for her life.

I offered my hand and Matha took it. Then I did something incredibly complicated with my magic. It flowed out to the girl and stopped. Other magic flowed across the shape I had created and it swirled around the girl like a whirlwind. I’d seen this dozens of times now and it still amazed me. It struck me that I had offered a plea to the wild magic and it had agreed to help. I couldn’t imagine anyone on Balmack seeing it that way.

The girl gasped and fell to the floor. One of the other mage’s stepped up and placed a blanket over her. Then the girl started screaming.

Matha let go of my hand and rushed over to the child, comforting her in her arms. I glimpsed magic flow between them as Matha taught the child the Balmack language.

“They killed mummy,” the girl cried and Matha hugged her. Another flow of magic calmed the child, but did not in any way compel her, so skillfully was it applied.

Some minutes later, Matha handed the child to a woman who had been summoned to the room.

She stood and looked at me for a second time. Waving all the others out of the room she created a pair of chairs and sank into one of them. I took the other.

“What are you, Wizard Morrissey?”

“I don’t understand?”

She waved her hand impatiently. “I know you are of human stock. You are a hedge wizard with a growing reputation for causing trouble wherever you go. You have forged unlikely alliances, just as you have created deadly enemies
and
you have formed an unlikely friendship with a dragon of ancient and noble lineage. But what are you?”

I shook my head and she sighed.

“It doesn’t matter. You must restore the other petrified people while the others are gone. We will maintain the fiction that you have taught me how to do it and we will claim I did it.”

“You didn’t learn how to do it?”

She gave a bitter laugh. “I could send the appeal you made, but would anything respond? If I tried, it wouldn’t have your signature on it.”

I could only shake my head. I hadn’t sent a message, so much as asked the magic to restore them. It somehow created that swirling thing. That was why I couldn’t teach the method.

Matha leaned across and patted me on the shoulder.

“Don’t fret about it. I’m sure it will all become clear in time. But let’s get on, shall we? The others will get curious if we take too long and there are a lot of people to restore.”