The Galactic Mage (5 page)

Altin moaned. The old man was always so calm and patient. Why did Altin seem to forget that all the time? He locked up a little inside whenever he had to go to Tytamon for help. The defensive reflex was worse when Tytamon came to him, normally because his errors were so easily observed. He drew in a deep breath and let it all spill out.

“I can’t do it. I can’t get there. It’s too damned far away. I’ve hit the limit of my power and I’m no closer now than I was two years ago when I figured out how to enchant the seeing stones. I can suck the night dry of mana and still not even make a dent in finding it. It’s damnably far away, Tytamon. You have no idea how far away it has to be from here.”

“Well, you’re right about that; I don’t. But I can guess that if a Z-class teleporter with your gifts hasn’t figured it out after all this time, it must be pretty far.”

“I can port myself to Duador in one shot, no hop, damn it. How is it that I can’t even three-hop far enough to change my perspective on the moon to something I can see? Something at least noticeable to the eye?”

Tytamon leaned away from him, a bushy eyebrow raised. “Duador?” He remained calm, but a genuine storm brewed behind that cocked gray cloud upon his brow.

“Only once,” Altin hastily amended. “Just once, a year ago, to see if I could do it. Just there and back, not even a full minute in between. Just time to breathe and recast.”

“There and back? That’s it?” He was looking straight through Altin and the young mage felt certain that Tytamon was using some subtle O-class mindreading on him. He hadn’t the courage to try a lie.

“Well, ok, there and then to String, and then back here.” As soon as the words left his mouth he knew that Tytamon was going to blast him on the spot, or cast a six-month silence spell on his tongue, or worse, throw him out of Calico for good.

“You three-hopped around the whole planet?”

The reply caught Altin off guard.

“Well, yes,” he answered reluctantly. “It was three full ports, actually, but I could have done the whole thing in one shot knowing what I know now about the distance. It wouldn’t even be hard.”

Tytamon looked amazed. He appeared to be about to say so, and then checked himself, saying instead, “Why in the name of Lord Morton’s moustache would you do something so ridiculously dangerous as going to Duador? I mean, the elves on String could have done any number of things to you for trespassing, much less breaking a five-hundred-year-old treaty… but Duador? Good gods, man, that’s insanity. Is there any place worse that you could go? Next thing you’ll be telling me you….” He cut himself off. “Foolish boy.”

“Look,” said Altin, his ire up a bit. “I’m not a foolish boy. I’m twenty-two. And I knew exactly what I was doing. I spent the entirety of eight months prior to that jump reading up on Duador and on String. I knew exactly where the demons arrived, and I knew exactly where the hordes should be in their ravaging rounds. I scried out my landing twenty-seven seconds before the cast, landed exactly on target, and was gone before a puff-adder has time to strike. Same goes for String, adding fifty-eight seconds from the time I scried it out as well. What I did may have involved some risk, but the way I did it was neither foolish nor reckless. It was calculated risk, necessary to my work, and I put in the book time just like you always insist I do. You are right to be mad at me for doing it, but you are wrong to think I did it foolishly. I did not.” He stared back at Tytamon defiantly, his lips and hands trembling.

Tytamon studied him for awhile, a long silence before beginning to nod. Altin was at least a year older than the rest had been, more disciplined too. The look in the aged sorcerer’s eyes suggested an internal debate. “But why did you do it?”

Tytamon was stalling. Altin knew. He just didn’t know why. “I needed to get an idea how far I can jump. I needed something as a measure. And now I have it. That was all. I’m trying to do like you taught me. One tiny detail at a time. Each chip from the stone moves closer to the statue; the finer the detail, the finer the work. I get that. I swear I do. I’m not just another reckless Six.”

“They’re not always reckless, Altin. They lack circularity. We’ve had this conversation before. That much power without access to the whole circle of magic limits your ability to work that power safely. You can’t know what you don’t see because you’ve never seen it, can’t see it. For ninety-nine-point-nine percent of humanity, lack of circularity doesn’t matter. But when you are a Six, it does. The law of circularity is proven, Altin.”

“Well, I’m not a Six, so it doesn’t matter.”

“Your guild card says you are.”

“They’re wrong. I skipped divination on one side and growth on the other, and yet still hold K-class in illusion? How does that fit into the law of circularity?”

Tytamon really didn’t want to have this argument again.

“It doesn’t, that’s how,” Altin pressed. “I’m either a K or better in healing, or I’m a K or better in divination; it’s just latent or something.”

“You’re twenty-two. Nobody is that latent. It’s never happened.”

“Eight of eight never happened either. Not until you.”

The problem with bright young apprentices was that sometimes they made argumentation tedious. And on this particular topic, Altin was unyieldingly adamant, and, unfortunately, at least possessed of a logical case, if not a reasonable one. He drove Tytamon to fits, and quite despite the great magician’s considerable experience with powerful young mages. However, Tytamon would not allow himself to be drawn into this fight again today. Besides, he had something else in mind. “Look, do you want my help or not? We can argue about your Seven-ness some other time.”

Altin stopped abruptly, ignoring the sarcastic undertones. “What kind of help?”

“I realize that it will likely be the death of you, but I know how you Sixe… Sevens can be if you don’t get your way. I didn’t stop Finnius from defying the gods and getting himself fried by divine wrath; I let Synthia play with her mermaid soil; and, my coupe de grace, I allowed Miss Montclaire to destroy herself and, in the process, facilitate the genocide of an entire race. Why should I not help you out as well?

“Sadly, Kurr has no better mentor for you kids, and, well, I have no better method of mentoring than to advise caution and give what advice I may. You’re going to chase your dreams with or without me, but perhaps, with some luck and a few friendly suggestions, you might live to realize your potential. Just try not to level the castle this time. You people are so hard on these old walls.”

There was something of resignation in his bearing, a weariness, as if he, like Nipper, did not want to endure another dead apprentice, another round of grief and chaos and the rebuilding of broken towers and sundered hearts. But he was willing to do it because it needed to be done. He seemed reconciled to it now. And apparently the time was right to try.

“Come with me, boy.” He got up from the bench and strode purposefully from the room.

His aged legs carried him swiftly, belying his feeble frame as he passed through the central courtyard and unlocked the massive steel door that guarded the entry to the underground sections of his tower. Altin had never been down here before. He followed Tytamon down flights of stairs that carried them a couple of stories down. Finally they emerged into a low, dark basement, the ceiling only a hand’s width above Altin’s head. Altin followed Tytamon, guided entirely by the rustling of his robes, until Calico’s master reached for a lamp hanging on the wall, finding it by memory in the Stygian blackness, and a moment later it sprung to light, illuminating the space around.

The entire room was clutter. Pure clutter. Crates were stacked everywhere, against every wall, piled in every corner and heaped about the middle of the room. Where there weren’t any crates, there were barrels and casks. Atop the barrels and casks there were small boxes and sacks and elegant chests and little piles of assorted things like books and cloth and vials of mysterious liquids, powders and gels, all of which combined to give off the most curious of smells, metallic yet with a hint of flowers and perhaps a bit of burning hair. The room was filled literally to the rafters with various objects and containers too numerous to count, and all were covered with layers of dust as thick as a slice of bread. The dust was soft and powdery, of such fine consistency that it began to waft into the air, stirred up by their footsteps and the breezes created through the fanning motions of their pendulous robes and vacuous dangling sleeves. The rising dust coated Altin’s mouth and the inside of his nose, its dryness and the musty taste causing him to sneeze and cough, which only made the situation worse.

“Juice of a werebat,” Altin spat, coughing harder and pressing a fold of his sleeve against his face in an attempt to filter the particles in the air. “This is awful.”

Tytamon, seemingly unaffected by the dust, wasted no time with any of the boxes or barrels and headed straight for a low, iron-bound door made of thick oaken planks mounted on the room’s furthest wall. Altin scurried through the jumble and stood near the ancient mage, waiting expectantly and blinking at the dust that was drying out his eyes.

Tytamon placed his hands on the rough wood and spoke a few words of magic. The door’s cast-iron handle flamed for a moment as a magical trap disarmed. Altin had to blink a few more times, waiting for the stain of the magic’s brightness to leave his retinas. Tytamon pulled a ring of keys from a pocket in his robes and unlocked the conventional lock that was in the handle too. He turned to Altin for the first time since leaving the kitchen and said in a voice so low and foreboding that it startled the younger man to chills, “Don’t utter one word of magic in here. Not one. Not even a thought. Do you hear me?”

Altin, wide-eyed and with goosebumps rising on his back and arms, nodded affirmatively. Not a word.

Tytamon opened the door revealing a tiny chamber, barely three paces across in either direction, and stepped inside. Altin followed. The ceiling was too low for his six-foot frame by about two inches, and so he had to stand awkwardly, alternating between ducking his head and spreading his legs. Neither worked very well, but he made do and looked around.

Shelves. Three sets of shelves, that’s all there was to see. And the sets against the left and right walls were almost empty. On the right side, the lowest shelf held a skull of some sort, a twisted, toothy looking thing the species of which Altin couldn’t even hazard a guess. To the left, on the upper shelf there sat a little jewelry box, tiny, hardly bigger than a bar of soap, and upholstered in lace, once white but now brown with age and dust. A miniature silk bow on its curved top was the little box’s only decoration, and the bow was so old that it had lost all but the faintest tinge of pink. But neither of these were what had brought them here, for Tytamon went directly to the shelves mounted on the room’s farthest wall.

These shelves had several things on them, most of which meant nothing to Altin. There was an old oil lamp and something resembling a lute. There were two tattered books that looked as if Tytamon had dug them out of a thousand-year-old grave, and there was a small leather pouch, no bigger than a dehydrated pear. And it was to this last that Tytamon went. He took it off the shelf gingerly, and looked back once more at Altin. “Not one word of magic. Or we’re both dead.”

Altin watched breathlessly as Tytamon pulled open the drawstrings and poured out the pouch’s contents into the palm of his weathered hand. Three small stones, ugly, yellowish and roughly the size of a peach pit each. That was it.

Altin frowned.

“Liquefying Stone,” Tytamon breathed, raising his hand towards Altin and lifting the lamp so Altin could get a better look. The lamp’s golden light augmented the stone’s strangely crystalline luminosity, as if the outer surface were transparent, like crystal, but the inside something else. Altin tried to look deeper into it, unconsciously taking the lamp from Tytamon and leaning down close. Experience suggested that the light could go deeper into the rock, should go deeper, but it just didn’t; it just seemed to disappear. It was like looking into a mirror that only reflected you but not the rest of the room behind. You knew the room was there, that you should be able to see it, but it just wasn’t there. He commented on this oddity aloud.

“It’s not that the light doesn’t go in,” said Tytamon. “It does. It just doesn’t come out. It can’t. Which is why you must always keep it covered when you aren’t using it. Mana isn’t the only thing this stuff can amplify.”

“So what is it?” Altin reached for one of the stones as he asked the question, half expecting Tytamon to snatch them away.

“It’s an amplification stone. A huge amplification stone. Freakish. Not like those meager potions the Conduits try to make.”

Altin nodded, he liked where this idea seemed to be going, but he didn’t say anything as Tytamon went on.

“You know how much mana you drew last night? Well, you can pull twice that much if you’re touching one of these and you don’t know what you’re doing—sometimes even if you do. You can pull that much, even in a single cast.”

Altin scrunched up his face in disbelief. “How? Once I get what I can reach, it’s gone. Cleared space is cleared space. Or does the stone extend my range?”

“Boy, you have no idea.” He dropped the other two stones back into the pouch and drew the strings tight. “I’ve kept this stuff secret for years. I don’t even keep the things I know about demon summoning as hushed as I do Liquefying Stone.” He waggled the pouch in the air as he spoke to emphasize his point, sending a little cloud of dust billowing around their heads. Altin coughed as the centuries-old sorcerer put the pouch with the two remaining stones back on the shelf and motioned for Altin to leave the claustrophobic little room. Altin happily obliged, gripping the single stone tightly in his hand.

“No magic,” Tytamon reminded him as they exited.

“I know,” Altin answered, impatiently. He wasn’t a child anymore.

“Can’t be too careful,” came the reply as the ancient mage locked the door with the iron key. He pushed Altin towards the exit, remaining behind and making no move to renew the magic lock on the door until Altin was all the way across the room. When he had recast the lock, he rejoined Altin and they started up the stairs. “You need to keep it covered. And not just in your pocket. A hole in the lining and you’re a dead man.”