Warrior (The Key to Magic) (30 page)

She got no sense that he was hinting that he would be willing to share his own.  As a matter-of-fact, if she had had to guess, she would have said that he had not even considered that option.

"These are fine.  Yhejia is close."

He moved toward the open door.  "Well, let me know if you need anything."

"Wait."  She stood up and took the disk from the pocket of her sweater.  "I have something for you."

He came back, took the planchet-like object, and immediately began to study it with an unfocused stare that revealed that he was delving its magic.

"It's supposed to be a book of some sort, but I haven't been able to read it.  It's something that was promised to me months ago, but not actually delivered until I boarded the
Empress Telriy
."

"You want my help with it?" he asked, still concentrating.

"No, it's yours.  I've decided that I don't ... want it anymore."

"There's a modulation that obviously needs a key.  I think I can activate it.  Do you want to see what it does?"

"No."

"Sure?"

"Yes."

He dropped it into his pants pocket.

Then the baby kicked strong enough to make her jump.  "Oh!"

"Are you alright?"

"Yes.  The baby kicked.  She's been a scamp of late."

His face lit up. 

After a brief hesitation, she submitted to an impulse and asked, "Do you want to feel her?"

"Do you mind?"

She shook her head, unbuttoned her sweater, then pulled up her baggy blouse to reveal her enormous abdomen.  Reaching out, she took his hand and placed it just to the right of her navel.  Though the skin of his palm had the same workman's roughness that she remembered, she felt a heady warmth from his touch.

He grinned.

"Did you feel that?"

"Yes."

She turned slightly around, drawing him in closer so that his hand and forearm circled around her waist to slide all the way across her stomach.  "Like this, you can hold all of her and feel the movements."

He laughed.  "It's like she's trying to swim."

"Yes."

Then she laid her head back upon his shoulder and for some incomprehensible reason began to cry.

FORTY-SIX

Located in the rain lashed spire of a crumbed acropolis that had not been occupied in thirteen hundred years, the sorcerer's room was small and cold, but protected by resurrected wards of tremendous power.  That the place was nigh uninhabitable was of no import.

Using a bucket for a stool and the shelf of the single tarp sealed window for a table, the sorcerer frowned in concern, taping the skrying tablet with an agitated finger.

"She was not supposed to return to Mhajhkaei."

"You are sending Mar to his doom," Waleck reproached.  "Let him at least rest in the arms of his beloved before he must die."

"But this violates the sequence.  Her presence might blunt the intensity of his motivations."

"You know that it will not."

"Yes, yes, that is true.  His course is set now.  There is no way that he can detour from it."

"This place is drafty," Waleck complained.  "You should set aside the tablet for a while and get back to work on sealing the holes."

"This is only a temporary abode.  Soon I will have a grand villa built upon the warm southern shore."

"Of course, but for now you live in a wretched hole that even rats would not occupy."

The sorcerer sighed and powered down the tablet.  "I shall excise you one day, you know."

"Yes, but for now I am the only company that you have."

FORTY-SEVEN

While Telriy slept in what was now
their
bed -- there were still no guarantees and she had made no explanations, but it seemed that she had indeed returned for
him
-- Mar rose quietly from her side and flew through the dark to his dayroom.  The Cousins were up and though some light came through the balcony shutters, he relied on the background ether to navigate.  The device that she had given him was on his desk.

Settling down into his chair, he extended his ethereal sense and examined the coin-shaped bit of metal.   The crowded mass of modulations that existed within it were softly dim, with the singing strands so thick that it was difficult to distinguish one sound-color from another.  These were not weak, he thought, but rather simply elegant in a highly efficient and effective way.  As he studied the twisting, looped constructions, he found pattern and balance, and the notion arose in him that this ancient spell had been created by someone with the unique talent of an artist.

The prominent loop that he had noted originally protruded off-center from the mass.  This was, for want of better words, thicker, shriller, and more chartreuse than the rest.  He prodded this lightly and it instantly changed shape, state, and pitch.

"In the two thousand thirteenth year of the common reckoning, I, Whinseschlos, whose father was Menklin of the Family of Ba'regnt and whose mother was Sylima of the Family of Limtaoem, began this recording."

The words that came into Mar's mind were not like Standard Imperial or Gheddessii or any other language that he had heard spoken, but he understood them all the same.

"I leave these thoughts as a simple exercise of vanity.  They contain no great original insights or revealed truths.  They are simply a statement that I once lived and a personal comment on my own life as a wizard."

"It is often said that wizards are masters of time and space.  This is simply a lie.  I am a wizard, highly regarded in my own era for the power of my magic, and I have hurled myself into undertime and surfed the periphery of ethereal forces that could easily destroy me more often than I should have, and I will tell you without reservation that I can only claim to be a thief skulking through the attics and cellars of the history of the world, peeking out of  mouse holes as others go about their fixed lives and fearing to tread lest an unwary step cause a sound that would alert those upon whom I spy."

"If you who are hearing this are a wizard, then you well understand what I have said, but if you are not then there are two facts that you must straightaway learn about wizardry: not all things can be changed and not all changes are good."

"Save a child from drowning in a river and the next year while you are away he will sicken and die from a fever.  Go back to save him once again and a horse will kick him to death when he is but an adolescent.  Save him again and again and again and he will still die, perhaps finally in his own bed at an advanced age surrounded by weeping kith and kin, and there will be ten thousand other children that you could not save from fire, flood, pestilence, or violence."

"Choose, nevertheless, to pull another child from a fire and he will grow to be a man who will die defending a bridge across a nameless stream and thereby cause a great nation to fall and a thousand years of savagery to prevail."

"Smother a tyrant in his bed and his brother will take his place and oversee the extermination of his own people."

"Teach better farming methods to a hungry village and after another generation the village will slaughter its neighbors to take their land."

"Avert a war, but settle none of the grievances, and the next one will be ten times more horrible."

"Wizards are mere mortals, not gods, and only the foolish ones try to interfere in the affairs of men.  Even innocent observation can change events."

"Given all this, you may be moved to ask to what useful purpose can this magic be put?"

"My answer to that question must be that I have utterly no idea."

There was a break then, as if a pause of some length had been taken.

"I am moved to comment on my perception of undertime.  At some point I may use these notes to compose an instructive tome.  Or, I may just as likely  throw them away."

"Many authors are fond of the terms associated with fluid mechanics when called upon to describe undertime.  One word that often crops up is "flow."  Contrary to the impression that this word might convey, I do not believe that undertime can be said to flow, unless one expands the definition to include a combined sensation of stationary existence and constant movement that occurs as a result of simultaneous regression and progression in infinite directions.  However, since I must, if reluctantly, acknowledge the fundamental limitations of my own intellect, I will not attempt to create a new and equally inadequate term and simply submit to the slothful consensus."

"Therefore, allowing that undertime 'flows,' how does one navigate on this impossibly myriad 'stream?'"

"No two wizards will tell you the same thing."

"Six hundred years ago, from my base temporal perspective, Pontelneu the Bold wrote that he followed the pains in his bones.  A scholarly contemporary of mine, Nhighbyen, insists that complex mental calculation is required."

"I am of a mind that each must decipher the path for himself in a way that has personal intellectual significance."

"My method is this: I quite simply run as fast as I can to reach a place which is not where I want to be."

"I realize that this is nonsensical and does not comply with the previous analogy, but it does illustrate the basic concept that travel in undertime is a perception, not an action that can be described in logical or  physical terms."

"When you are in undertime, you are outside of the sway of normal existence.  You occur in a special circumstance that has no relation to your original physical substance.  In undertime, your apparent physical body is only a magical manifestation.  You do not need to eat but you can perform the similitude of eating.  You do not need to breath but you can draw in air.  You do not need to walk -- or swim -- to move about but you can place one foot in front of the other.  And so on and so forth.  This property does not mean that you cannot die in undertime or sustain injury.  The riptides of undertime have rent many a wizard."

"One final warning: undertime possesses a catalytic boundary and this fringe is the aspect that most students first encounter.  This is a terrible and deadly place. Pass through it as quickly as possible.  Adhering to the analogy -- do not just dip a toe to test the waters, dive for the depths!"

Another break occurred.

”Wizardry, of all the magical disciplines, does not lend itself to measurement, calibration, or postulate.  Wizardry has no spells, no formulas, and no established practices.  Like the easiest magical discipline, Enchantment, the most difficult, Wizardry, cannot be taught but must simply be learned."

"While the fundamental magical capabilities of a wizardry candidate must be extremely high, this alone does not guarantee success.  Only those who possess an innate wizardly disposition -- a characteristic which has never been incontrovertibly established to actually exist -- dare open a crack between the background ether and the raw forces of time.  And even those that have this undefined quality often fail.  No fewer than seven of ten candidates who disappear into undertime are never seen or heard from again.  While a few of these may have discovered a more compatible place or era in which to expend the subsequent years of their lives, it must be assumed that the majority of these candidates have failed to survive the experience."

Break.

"A wizard cannot change his own past, only another man's future.  There is no such thing as a paradox; this concept is purely a human vanity.  The universe, being quite resilient, will not under any circumstances recognize the notion that situations that do exit, but should not exist, therefore cannot exist."

"From time to time, spurious theories have been proposed to contradict this fundamental postulate.  One of the most famous is the purported Law of Magical Equilibrium, whereby it is alleged, among other things, that two temporally similar individuals cannot exist in the same proximate instant of time."

"Both the Law of Magical Equilibrium and the concept of a paradox were famously disproven by the theoretical-wizard Ronal in one thousand one hundred and eleven of the common reckoning.  Under observation by six other magical professionals, Ronal went fifteen minutes into his own past and killed his former self with a firearm.  The universe did not intervene.  The second Ronal did not vanish or was otherwise prevented from accomplishing his own self-murder. No apocalyptic rearrangement of ethereal flux occurred.  While the second Ronal recalled the full chain of events, the observers could only verify that the first Ronal had been killed by a man who looked exactly like him before he had been able to initiate his experiment.  The second Ronal composed a note recording the sequence of events from his perspective, included his own planned future actions, and then delivered the note to himself in the prior week.  Subsequently, the second Ronal again returned to the point in time where the murder had occurred and killed his own previous incarnation before the murder of the initial Ronal could take place, whereupon the saved first Ronal, warned in advance, used his own firearm to kill his third incarnation in order to, as he later put it, 'neaten things up.".  Of course, this account relies only on the note of the second Ronal and the deductions of the surviving Ronal as the latter did not, in fact, possess the memories of either his second or third incarnation.  The observers affirmed that two other individuals who were exact copies of Ronal appeared and were killed, but indicated that the experiment did not actually take place as Ronal had never translated into undertime.  Sadly, Ronal continued to be vexed by murderous doppelgangers for years to come and eventually went insane, was institutionalized, and was finally garroted under mysterious circumstances by an unknown assailant."