JET 8.10: LEARN TO TEACH
“They call it a problem of evil, as though they understood the meaning of perfection without ever attempting to imagine it. Let it be said thus: there is War in Heaven, waged unceasing across a plenitude of dimensions so great as to defy definition. Shall that not answer the eternal query on both its faces?”
– from ‘The Book of Kultemeren’, 1:206-211
Bleak grey waves stretched as far as the eye could see into the distance, and curtains of white motes drifted down slowly into the waters. Snow was rare here, for whatever reason, and I’d never actually seen snow falling into the sea before – not close-up like this, at any rate – but there was a first time for everything. The bay was remarkably still at this time of day, the waves falling upon the rocks with little more than a rhythmic rumble. The ice floes had been reduced to little white eggs tapping against the shoreline. I stood at the rail of the walkway above the surf, a fur-lined glove enclosing my fingers as I gripped the frost-clad wooden beam. Thirty feet below me, Northril reigned.
But not here. This was the province of Deymar and his thanes. My province, if I wanted to think of things that way. I was, after all, a lord.
I tried not to think too much about it, something I found surprisingly easy, considering how often I was being addressed in deferential terms.
For an outsider, I hadn’t done badly for myself in Telior. People still gave me strange looks – but only when they thought I wasn’t looking back. It was a fun thing indeed, to catch them mid-glance, turn my patented Feychilde grin on them and watch them melt in horror.
The people with me right now didn’t have any reason to cast me strange looks; they’d already seen me at some of my strangest.
“Vot about imps?” Nafala suggested, a faint blush creeping up her cheeks. The girl was shy, but her confidence was growing. “You could…”
I thought about the way I directly tapped the mizelikon’s essence in Zyger and shook my head, carefully arranging the apologetic smile on my face so she wouldn’t be too put-off by my denial.
“Won’t work,” I said plainly. “An imp’s essence is too weak to feed the spell for long, and certainly not indefinitely. There are particular creatures whose power could, for sure, keep the ensorcellment ticking over forever… But those are few and far between, and beyond your ability to summon.”
Nafala gazed at me, expectantly.
“Beyond my ability to summon!” I was thinking of the rose-man beneath Mund. “Any eldritch whose Wellspring you attached to an indefinite spell would, in the end, expire… I think.”
“What would happen then?” Roba said, half-groaning.
I gnawed my lip for a moment. “Well, the ensorcellment would weaken, then fail, and you’d have no way to tell when. You couldn’t just look at the rune, and judge its half-life by the fraying of the shape, like you could with the partial-infinity. You’d have to keep your eyes on the imp. The rune binding the eldritch Wellspring to the ensorcellment might look fine one minute, then simply evaporate the next.”
My two students looked at one another, clearly disgruntled. Nafala’s lips were pressed firmly together – she was doing her best to contain her disappointment – but Roba was actively scowling at his feet.
“And you both looked so happy, when you brought the idea to my attention…” I grinned at them, then tilted my head towards the nearest marketplace, not a hundred yards off at Tenport. “Fancy a snack before we test it?”
Their eyes lit back up at that.
“Oh, so you are hungry? Come on. It’s on me.”
It was the promise of the experiment that perked them both up, but even if I’d only offered the free meal I knew what the answer would be. I wasn’t actually responsible for paying their wages – not yet at least – but I was aware their stipend from the crown was a single percentage-point of my own, and they were quite well-off in comparison to a lot of their countrymen. Some food was the least of a bonus I could offer such diligent, thoughtful scholars.
I turned to lead the way, steering around a group of belligerent beggars and a stack of cockle-loaded pallets, heading up towards the ladder-stair we needed.
“You’re alvays eating,” Nafala said as she fell in just behind me. She spoke out of curiosity more than complaint – it was hardly like she was going to put me off, given she was getting something for herself into the bargain.
“Gosh, sorry,” I gushed. “I was under the stupid impression the human body requires regular feeding to operate – I’m obviously wrong…”
I expected a thump or a snigger, some acknowledgement of my attempt at humour, but I’d clearly failed. I glanced back at my apprentice, trying to show her my grin, but her eyes were on her footing as she evaded a tangle of rope stretched across the beams; she missed it.
If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
She wasn’t like anyone else I’d ever met. Introspective. Not prone to babbling. It made me wonder what would make someone choose such a life as this – why not go into another profession? It wasn’t like magic was limited to sorcery, and students of the other schools were actually respected. As we walked into the narrow market-way, either side of the path clogged with stalls and barely-moving lines of crowds, those crowds parted – but it wasn’t out of love for their betters. The unwashed masses saw our robes, and, remembering our reputations as dealers in the dark things of the world, they parted for us.
I resolutely fixed my childish, stupid smile, nodded my thanks to everyone I could and even tried to shake a few hands. My students were used to it by now. Nafala was too unassuming to try to emulate me, but clever, shaven-headed Roba was simply too scared. He was their kinsman, naturally afraid of expressing himself, experiencing humiliation.
I was the weird outsider. I had no friends to lose and hundreds of enemies to unmake. Damn right I shook as many hands as I could.
As much as I was the senior in terms of ability, in terms of station, I was acutely aware that, legally-speaking, I was still a kid in Telior. Yet I was also acutely aware of Nafala’s cuteness, and no amount of horrible past experience could stop my mind wandering from time to time, her its object. At least a quarter of my fearlessness came, I suspected, out of a deep-seated desire to impress her, and not just with my magic, my money.
I dropped a few coins in a trader’s palm, and hefted a crate of caramelised prawn sandwiches onto my shoulder, using a quick flash of satyr-strength to make it look easy. I hated the things, but the locals saw them as a delicacy, and I’d long-since learnt that treating my favourites to the tastiest snack in all of Telior without bringing more back to the tower for my other students would get me into hot water. I’d grabbed a plain loaf for me to enjoy back at the tower with my cheese, and all the way home Roba wouldn’t stop harassing me, until I finally broke down and tried a prawn butty for the second time just to shut him up.
“You didn’t see it the first time, did you?” I said, coming to a halt smack in the middle of a bridge between two rickety, creaking streets.
“I do no believe you no like!” Roba insisted. “Please – I must see!”
“Leave him alone,” Nafala murmured.
“Oh yeah.” I grinned at her. “You saw.”
A smile touched her lips, and she turned away to spare herself a repetition of the first experience. I was pretty sure I’d never looked uglier in my life than I did with a mouthful of dripping fishiness.
I let an old woman in a long coat walk around us – giving us such a wide berth she must’ve thought we were stopping to summon a hell-fiend – then pulled off my glove, produced a single noxious bun, and bit down into it.
I felt it pop, felt the gore running down my chin. The odour filling my nostrils reached down its stinky fingers into my lungs and I coughed the contents of my mouth out over the rail.
“Virdut knows! Aha!” Roba chortled, patting me on the back in a friendly fashion.
“Never… again…” I moaned.
“Make no promises!” he yelled, still laughing.
I glanced about. There had to be at least a dozen pairs of eyes on us while we stood there, being immature wielders of devastating forces.
Good, I thought. Whatever they think of us, they need to know we’re just people too.
I drew myself up, smoothed down my robes, and looked around at my accidental audience as I cried, “Best prawns in Telior!”
Those watching quickly fell back about their business, and, laughing along with Roba, I continued to lead the way back up to the posh levels. I had no trouble navigating the place, using wraith-form wherever needed to bypass difficult changes in elevation, hauling the food-crate with me through a shadow of Nethernum from time to time.
The sandwiches were for sorcerers. Sorcerers wouldn’t mind.
I appraised my new abode as we approached. It was a slipshod, lopsided piece of architecture, more appealing to my Sticktowner’s soul than any of the Telese might have guessed. The base was squarish, but a poor attempt had been made at circular upper levels, and the section where the two styles were married together was a morass of iron rivets, struts and support-beams. Almost entirely comprised of oil-dark planks, my tower stretched up out of the edge of the palace courtyard like a blackened finger, bits of long-abandoned rope-ladder still clinging to it from the days of its construction – or, probably, reconstruction.
The view from my bedroom balcony was magnificent. Almost as much as Deymar from his throne, I ruled the ocean from my eyrie; Northril’s vast expanse was more like an endless peaceful tundra than anything so chaotic as churning waters, the motions of its distant white waves almost imperceptible when looked upon from such remove.
When we reached the porch I lowered my hood, lowered my wraith-essence. It was instinctive, now, when I left the bitter chill of the outdoors. I’d been doing it so long, the nethernal state had become part of my reflexes. Part of my self. Even when I was reducing its hold on my flesh and blood and bone, I knew it was still there, always there, ready to be called upon, relied upon.
The door was unlocked; it always was. The locks on the upper levels only I had the key to – and perhaps the king or some city-guard or other – but the lower levels could be accessed at all hours for the purposes of work or trade. Any miscreant wandering up the stair-ladders to my private floors would find more than just locks in their way, however. Only the warlock and his siblings would be able to pass the gauntlet of invisible imps without enduring a surprise-attack. A surprise-attack of quite possibly inappropriate weirdness. I knew at least one of my imps was obsessed with stealing clothes, and, due to an enforced period of abstinence from his favourite hobby, I feared a potential thief or intruder would stumble back out of my tower not only covered in boils and blisters, but completely butt-naked too.
Entering, we were presented with the narrow spiral staircase which led up to the hanging walkways of the next floor above us, with the store-rooms at either end of the main bridge. Slightly below us, the workshop was teeming with activity. Half-completed, highly-theoretical arcane glyphs were scrawled in chalk on slate, or other random surfaces all over the room. Experimental objects festooned the side-tables near the shelves, some glimmering to my sorcerer’s-eye, nakedly dangerous if mishandled. Morbid vats and extra-planar materials were lying around exuding their strange, familiar scents.
Home, I thought, almost with satisfaction.
* * *