Journeyman (A Wizard's Life) (16 page)

Benen found that he could shape-shift to different animal forms and test out their senses. When he tried the bat, he was surprised to find that the wizard had been right. He decided to apologize to him at the next moot.

Using the magic of the Great Sky River slightly differently than he usually did for shape-shifting, Benen managed to expand his sensory range to what he had found in the animal kingdom. He could sense walls with his eyes closed, even behind him, and he could sense heat. He had even found that some birds could see more purples than he could. He’d included that into the senses provided by his spell.

With these new perceptions Benen re-examined the constellations, spending months doing so. In the end, although it was novel, it did not yield any useful information. He had secretly hoped that there were stars, normally invisible, that he would be able to see with his new abilities; there were not.

But then it occurred to Benen that there were plenty of stars and other celestial bodies wizards routinely ignored and never used for magic. Their greatest blind-spot was the Spill. These more distant stars and groupings of stars lay farther away than those normally used by wizards, but they were incredibly numerous; there were more of them than Benen could count. The Spill formed a sort of starry background band across part of the sky and it was so thick with stars that it sometimes looked like the Creator had spilt a glass of milk — hence its name.

Wizards argued that the stars in the Spill were too distant to provide flavouring to their magic and so they ignored them. Benen decided this might well have been a mistake on their part. He spent years charting and examining the stars in the Spill, filling book after book on his observations.

As he went he named each star. The first few he named after people he had known through the years. There were stars Benen named Sania, Esren, Mellen, and Timmon, for example — the ghost was very touched by this. But as he progressed, he began running out of even the names of people he hadn’t really known and then out of names altogether. This was when he began naming stars after things. Thus there are stars in the Spill called such names as Tree, Leaf, Sky, Night, Day, Chair, Wall, Floor, Roof, etc.

He was so obsessed with cataloguing these that he missed the next moot.

After a decade of observations, Benen had enough to work with and began trying to cast spells using the bodies from the Spill. He did not know what the different stars would bring to his magic and tried to leave his mind open to any sort of effect as he tried casting.

The result of his work: nothing.

Not even the usual pain accompanying a failed spell.

Benen’s hopes were shattered and he was inconsolable for weeks. But Timmon kept trying to get Benen to persevere.

“Maybe there’s something you’re missing, Benen,” the ghost said when he brought the wizard a meal. Benen ignored him.

He only returned to his research when it occurred to him that he had not tried all the celestial bodies wizards normally ignored: Benen began to chart comets.

When it came time to try using comets as part of his magic, he was again disappointed. The small transitory bodies yielded him nothing.

Resigned, Benen returned to trying combinations of conventional constellations and planets. Each failure was excruciating and Benen was on the verge of giving up when, one night, upon waking from a dream, he realized he had never tried to use the Spill as a whole as a constellation of its own.

Benen felt excited and revitalized by this possibility. He became certain that combining the Spill with the likely constellations was the key to teleportation. But before he could use the Spill in its entirety this way, he had to chart more of it. Incomplete knowledge of a constellation could cripple a wizard; he shuddered at what backlash he would feel if he did not know the Spill as well as he possibly could.

More books of observations of the Spill piled up as more years passed. Benen lost count of the moots he had missed.

It was at the end of these years spent charting the Spill that Benen came upon a strange anomaly.

While looking at a particularly distant star in the Spill, Benen saw that it appeared to be extending a tendril of itself seemingly toward nothing. Unfortunately, the scene was so distant that Benen — even with his enhanced and magnified senses — could not make out what was happening clearly.

It could have been because he was desperate to find
something
of interest, or because he wanted a break from the monotony of his observations, but regardless of the reason, Benen latched on to this find and became determined to get to the bottom of it.

To do this, he would need a telescope. With such a device, he believed his heightened senses would be magnified further by the lenses and he would then be able to see what exactly was happening to the star he had named Grass. He noted the location of Grass quite accurately in his book and made arrangements for acquiring a telescope.

Benen did not want to go to Southren to find the makers of the devices, but he would if he had to. He could have contacted Oster to ask him how he had gotten his own telescope, but he preferred to avoid contact with his old master as much as he could. Instead, he contacted Mellen with the same magical effect he had used previously to speak to the old wizard.

“I’m sorry to disturb you, Master Mellen, but would you be available to answer a question for me?” he sent through his magic.

The response came an hour later: “I am available now, Benen. I’m please to hear from you, we have missed you at the moots.”

“I’ve been busy, I will try to make it to the next one.”

“How is your progress? The impossible is not so easily accomplished, is it?” The comment would have stung from someone other than Mellen.

“That’s why I am contacting you. I need a telescope in order to proceed with a particular avenue of research.”

“A telescope? Those Southren contraptions?”

“Yes, exactly.”

“Why do you need one of those? Magic should serve just as well.”

“I’m trying to see something very far away, farther than magical enhancement is allowing.”

“Dear! Why are you looking at objects so far away?”

“I’m looking at what others have dismissed. How else would I solve the impossible?”

Mellen considered this for a few moments before replying. “Very well. I will contact a friend I have in Southren and ask him to acquire a telescope for you and have it sent to you.”

Benen could not believe it could be this easy. “Really?”

“Really. The cost, of course, will be exorbitant. I assume you can afford it.”

He assured Mellen that he could and then the two caught each other up on wizardly news for a short time before the old wizard had to leave for an important meeting.

“It would not do to keep the king waiting,” he said in parting.

Benen was amazed at the ease with which he had managed to make arrangements for getting himself a telescope. It dawned on him how lucky he was to have made the acquaintance of — and later cultivated the friendship of — Mellen. The royal adviser was a powerful ally for him to have and he was thankful for his good luck in that regard.

While he waited for his telescope, Benen continued his observations of the Spill.

It took eight months before the device arrived at Benen’s Oasis.

#

Timmon was the one who noticed that the signal flag in the village had been raised by the folk below. Benen had set up this system so the villagers could request an audience with him as needed. They had never used it before.

Benen used his magic to descend to the ground, taking Timmon with him. The headman of the village was waiting near the flag, with him were two Southren men. Nearby, three waggons and their handlers waited.

“What is this?” Benen asked of the headman, though he already knew.

“These Southren folk say they have business with you, Lord Wizard.” The headman was always very formal.

Benen spoke to the Southren pair in their own tongue: “I am Journeyman Benen, my man tells me you have business with me.”

They bowed when he presented himself and introduced themselves as Pkor and Swod. They claimed to be
technicians
. Benen was familiar with the word from his study of Southren. A technician was a kind of tinkerer versed in the more difficult aspects of mechanical devices.

“We are to install the telescope for your greatness,” they told him.

Benen pointed at his flying tower, very high up above them all. “The installation needs to go up there.”

The technicians were quite willing to allow Benen to fly them up to the tower, but the waggons were another matter. In the end, Benen decided it would be easiest for all concerned if he simply landed the tower for the time needed to complete the installation of the telescope.

Everyone watched in awe as Benen gradually lowered the tower down from its usual position in the sky. The earth trembled when it finally made contact with the ground. When Benen looked around, he saw everyone had a mix of fear and awe on their faces — everyone but Timmon, that is. The ghost was not so easily impressed by magic anymore.

After that the installation proceeded smoothly. Benen spent a lot of time watching the technicians and their labourers work. He found the whole thing fascinating; everything they worked with was so complex and fragile. These technicians were wizards of a different kind from himself, but impressive nonetheless.

The telescope, once completed, was bigger by far than Oster’s; Benen guessed this was a much newer model than the old wizard’s. The technicians told Benen many technical specifications about the machine, but he could barely follow what they were saying. In the end, they gave him a manual, took their payment, and left, bowing as they went back to their waggons and away.

Benen returned his tower to its proper place in the sky and waited impatiently for the moon to rise so that he could begin his studies of the Grass anomaly. When the time came, he first had to spend two hours fiddling with the telescope’s alignment and settings before he had it pointed at the right place in the heavens.

At last, Benen looked into the eyepiece of the telescope and took new observations of the star he had named Grass. Again he saw the tendril of the star’s fire reaching out into space. With his heightened senses and the amplification provided by the telescope, Benen examined the point in space the tendril reached for and saw . . . nothing.

Forcing himself to pay attention to every magnified detail, Benen persisted in his observations. This persistence paid off: he saw that the tendril did not simply extend toward nothing: it curled at its end. It looked like water in a whirlpool.

But this was a star! Why was part of it drawn there and then curled around a black emptiness? No current was involved, much less two currents meeting to create a whirlpool.

This puzzled Benen; it made no sense. In the end, he had to abandon Grass and its anomalous tendril; he had to focus on his quest for teleportation.

He resumed mapping stars in the Spill until time came for the next moot. By then he had run out of single word names for stars and had begun multiple word names. His latest star had been Tree Bark, not to be confused with Tree Leaf, Tall Tree, and Oak Tree. He decided he needed the break and went to the moot.

Benen again faced some derision about his choice of doing the impossible as his master piece, but there were also many who were impressed he had stayed with the topic for so long despite his lack of success.

“I applaud your persistence, my friend,” Mellen told him when they met at the moot.

“I’m mule-headed, that’s all.” Benen was in low spirits.

“Don’t despair, Benen. How did the telescope work out?”

Benen shrugged. “It worked fine, it simply did not yield the answers I had hoped for.”

“What did you hope for?”

“I don’t know. Something impressive, previously undiscovered, and, while I’m wishing, something key to teleportation.”

“And what did you find?”

“A star doing something odd and unexplained. Unexplainable, even.”

“Oh? What exactly?” Mellen was quite interested. Benen remembered feeling that way when he had first seen the anomaly, but that had worn away when he could not figure out what it was that he was seeing.

“It looks like the star is reaching out to nothing. The end of the tendril curls and thins out to nothing. If anything, it looks like the star’s fire is going down a whirlpool, but there’s nothing there.”

Mellen smiled broadly then. “You should speak to Master Alack. He gave a lecture — two moots ago, I think — about an unusual binary pair that he called the Lovers. Talk to him about it.”

Alack, thankfully, was present at the moot. Benen wasted no time in tracking him down. The old wizard was eating at a table alone when Benen found him. He sat across from the wizard.

“Master Alack, I am Benen, a journeyman. May I ask you some questions? It’s rather important.”

Alack looked at Benen for a second, chewing and swallowing his latest bite of bread and cheese before speaking: “I know of you, Journeyman Benen. You seek the impossible.”