The working week and its monotony finally came to a close. After he cast the light-emitting spell, a red one, on the last bauble of the day and put it in the chute down to the boxing department, he pulled on his winter cloak and walked out of the building with his colleagues. Phimos and Deyra both knew of his plans, and when they bade him farewell till Moonday morning, they added a hushed ‘Good luck!’ and ‘You’ve got this, man!’ to their usual partings.
Starday arrived, the afternoon of the test, and it was exactly as his imagination had filled in the details. The hall was located in a well-appointed guild tower on the bank of the Whiteflood, a tall, narrow construction of coloured bands of stone. One of the Grandmaster’s current apprentices showed the candidates up several flights of stairs and into the testing chamber; it was only during the nervous, halting conversation they had while they were waiting that Dan found out the dwarf wasn’t just an assistant.
A dwarf? A dwarf, apprenticed to Nelesto?
Everyone knew that dwarves had the least magical potential of the various races. Considering their rarity, elves and gnomes produced mages and archmages at a staggering rate. While humans possessed little by way of supernatural ability, most magic-users were human simply due to demographics. But dwarves – bearing in mind the amount of them in the city, there were very few working in the magic sector. Thinking back about it, Dan had only met three or four dwarves in all his years working for Eturiel’s Enigmas – while he’d met dozens of elves and gnomes, and hundreds of fellow human mages.
The chap must be serious about pursuing his career, if the Grandmaster accepted him, Dan reminded himself.
He looked around at the other contenders. They were waiting in a room of oak and blue velvet curtains, large enough for them to spread out. As far as he was aware, there was only a single position open, and his dozen-or-so rivals seemed to be aware of that fact too. There was a lot of low muttering, a lot of last-minute spellbook-page flipping, a lot of clinks and rustles from hands frantically digging through bags of reagents.
Except for one applicant – a youngster even by Dan’s standards, the one who’d known that the dwarf was one of the Grandmaster’s apprentices. He was a foreigner with a complexion similar to Danaphrim’s own, hidden behind thick black whiskers and beneath a crooked mage’s hat. His brown leather robe looked more like a coat, and seemed to have known better days; it was strung with belts covered in component-pouches, but the young man seemed quite content with their layout. His hands were folded in his sleeves, and he stood closer to the centre of the room than anyone else, appearing open to conversation, a broad smile on his face.
Why isn’t he nervous? Dan thought; and wondering about that only made him feel more nervous still. There were mages here twice the smiling boy’s age, there were elves and a gods-damned gnome in here – just what was the lad so happy about?
Everyone straightened up when Grandmaster Nelesto entered, floating a few feet off the floor on the winds of wizardry.
The gnome was old. He was beardless, but there was a day’s growth of stubble on his cheeks and neck – he wore what remained of his hair in two spiky tufts behind his ears. His eyebrows were thick and white. His robe was exquisite, gold and grey and flowing, a sunlit forest river.
“Welcome!” His voice was deep for a gnome’s, and didn’t sound particularly welcoming. “I am Aubrel Nelesto, Master of the Sixth Way.” He came to hover with his back to one of the walls, and everyone followed him with their eyes. “You have come seeking tutelage, seeking the chance to garner your own accolades, fate willing.” He held out his little arm and the wrinkly hand extended from the sleeve’s cuff, pointing a tiny old finger at them. “Know this! There is no fate but what we make for ourselves. Even Timesnatcher can’t sit on his backside when he has a vision – he has to act! That’s why we’re here today. Well… why you’re here.”
The Grandmaster turned to the room’s entrance – he’d left the door ajar behind him – and beckoned to someone just out of sight.
It was the apprentices. One by one they filed in, nine of them. Their mage robes were plain but each and every one of them had an air of superiority about them: even the ones with true wisdom in their eyes still wore smug smiles on their lips.
Dan’s mouth went dry. He hadn’t exactly been expecting a written exam – what was I expecting, precisely? – but he’d never imagined the test would be quite so public as this.
They were to perform, not just for the Grandmaster but in front of an audience, an audience made up of the competition, of students more advanced than them?
As the last apprentice entered, the dwarf who’d led them to the room, one of the candidates balked and made a run for it. It was one of the indigenous Mundians, his pale skin turned white with stress and nausea, and he vanished through the doorway, almost bowling both himself and the dwarf over as he went.
The sound of the man’s fleeing feet slapping the stairs slowly faded.
Well… that’s one down, at least, Dan thought grimly. He had control of his stomach, his rebellious late breakfast… for now.
“The accolades begin now!” Nelesto went on, as though nothing had happened. “You see my students. Each of them has invented a greater variety of spells in the last twelve months than the average mage learns in a decade of schooling! We are extremely exclusive. We share our secrets only amongst ourselves.”
Dan looked around at the smug apprentices.
“It’s possible that not one of you produces magic of an acceptable quality,” the gnome continued. “Yet there is only one apprenticeship on offer. I will take only the very best in the city. My current students will help me make my decision, as always.”
Yeah, right, Dan thought sourly. You’ve definitely scried this out. You probably already know who wins.
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“Know this also. He or she who proves the greatest, will be accepted by my students as one of their own. You will receive help, guidance, not rejection and rivalries. This is at the heart of what I do here, with the Sixth Way. All artificial barriers to learning are set aside! We have our love of the art itself, and need naught else to sustain us!”
Dan felt the fire of inspiration in his blood, and, for the first time since arriving, raised his chin.
“Good! Now remember your number!” Grandmaster Nelesto pointed to an elf maiden. “One!” A pretty-looking gnome. “Two!” A burly old Westerman…
The confident youngster was seven. Dan was nine.
“We will witness your magic in ascending order. Please, number one, to the front, here my dear. Everyone else, back!”
Dan headed towards the rear of the empty room, trying to stride with the same self-assured expression that the bearded youngster wore on his face. Behind him, he heard the drifting Grandmaster offer a few words of encouragement to the quivering wreck of an elf maiden whose turn was first.
Within a few moments everyone was in place, the apprentices standing at the very back, leaning against the wall. The poor girl – she might’ve been fifty, because she looked like a teenager – was shaking in her boots; she was twisting a coil of her peach-coloured hair in her hands.
“Don’t be alarmed. You are to demonstrate one spell and one spell only. Each of you will have five turns, and should present a spell from a different magery on each demonstration. There are twelve of you, how nice, so we should be here a good while – please, if anyone requires it, there is a bathroom and refreshments just down the corridor. Do ensure you’re present when you are called, however.
“A word to the wise. It would behove you to begin with those schools of magic with which you are least proficient. We won’t necessarily assign any greater weight to the last spell than the first, so don’t fret if your fifth fizzles. But… well, we have noticed that we do tend to remember a grand finale.”
Dan caught the sound of some apprentices murmuring appreciatively behind him.
“Anyway – my dear. That should take some of the pressure off going first. Now, if you’d like to begin your preparations?”
The elf took a deep breath, let go of her coral curls, and got her act together.
Once she started, it was obvious to Dan just how good she was. She was preparing something from the divination school, he was pretty sure. His strongest, her weakest…
How magery was developed in the first place was the quintessential question of all magic research; finding those trails and unlocking new spells, new combinations of phrases, was the true calling of the mage. Sorcery, it was said, was the purest of mageries, due to its primary reliance on the genuine tongues of power: Etheric, Netheric, Infernal. The nature of the encryption which Litenwelt Kordaine and the others had used to formulate the tongue of spell-incantation was the core mystery of the world, in Dan’s eyes. (In the eyes of the most-popular modern theorists in the field, that was.) As he listened to her voice, he could almost hear the Etheric cadence to the elf’s chanting, even though the words would be meaningless in every magical tongue other than Materium’s. Other than the Five’s.
“I-if someone would be so kind as to hide this for me?”
None of the applicants dared move but an apprentice swaggered down from the back, took the proffered piece of chalk from the elf-girl’s hand and headed back.
On the way, Dan noticed as he tossed it to one of his friends, a burly lad who snatched it out of the air, reached into his boot and stowed it away inside his sock.
“Done,” the first apprentice called.
The elf turned back around and finished her spell, tapping her little glass bell with a small hammer; the bell shattered, and a light came into the elf’s eyes.
“I sense…” The maiden flicked her hair back behind her ears and took a few steps closer. “The chalk… It’s in a…” Her nose wrinkled. “A very smelly place…”
Everyone laughed: the candidates giggled somewhat nervously, while the apprentices roared, the burly guy loudest of all.
The elf successfully retrieved the chalk from the toxic sock – the apprentice wouldn’t do it for her, merely holding out his leg with a smirk on his face – and the Grandmaster seemed hardly to notice, nonchalantly congratulating her. Then it was number two’s go.
The turns went by. A gnome woman in a raunchy corset-style robe loosed a mediocre fireball that might’ve ignited its target… if its target was a bundle of exceptionally-dry kindling. An old man failed a shapechange.
Faint traces of a healing spell that would serve to heal a whole scabby knee. The tiny, almost-transparent illusion of a mouse, useful perhaps for toy-making and distracting cats for five minutes. A botched attempt to summon an imp, creating only a red flame that laughed mockingly for ten seconds.
When number seven was called, Dan perked up.
Let’s see what Mr. Confident can manage, he thought.
The youngster drew out a feather and a dried bird’s foot from his pouches, completed a short, squawking incantation and – poof! – he was instantly replaced by a fierce-eyed, brown-feathered hawk.
The Grandmaster clapped, as did some of his apprentices.
“Bravo!” he called. “A complete transformation, in the quickest time I’ve seen since…” The old gnome glanced down at the nine initiates, then frowned. “In a goodly while! I do hope you haven’t peaked early… How long can you hold it, may I ask?”
“Sixteen minutes, or thereabouts.”
The foreign voice emanated quite clearly from the hawk’s beak.
The Grandmaster raised a bushy eyebrow.
“From a single feather and trigger-phrase? No amplifications?”
The hawk nodded.
“If you wouldn’t mind maintaining the spell…?”
“Of course.”
The hawk half-hopped, half-flew back into place.
“Well, well… number eight!”
Dan realised it was almost his turn but he was distracted by the bird nonchalantly sitting there, cosying down in its soft bed of feathery flesh to watch the next contestant cast their spell. He wasted almost his whole preparation time looking at the damn thing. When Nelesto called for number nine his body reacted before his mind, setting his feet into motion in advance of him raising his head. He stared at the floor until he was at the front, then spun around to face them – the sea of expectant expressions – remembering only then why he’d always wanted to work in research, behind the scenes. Why he’d always opted for the modules with minimal practical exams.
Stage-fright gripped him, and the urge to run out the door was equally impossible to fulfil. He was rooted in place – every second that passed it would worsen –
Yune… Yune, please…
Then he remembered how he’d defeated the stage-fright, back in his second year, when he’d had to present a full vision to the class.
He closed his eyes.
“Number nine?” Nelesto asked.
“One moment.” Dan’s voice came out cool and collected now that he could no longer see the eyes on him – and speaking, hearing that smoothness in his own tone – it made it easier still.
He opened his eyes, smiling.
The horse-illusion he’d prepared turned out to be the biggest, most solid-looking anyone had yet demonstrated, and, while it couldn’t move and the Grandmaster didn’t quite clap, Dan could tell that his enchantment met the standard required.
I’ll do better next time, he thought, returning to his place, feeling a line of sweat running down his back under the robe despite the winter day’s chill. I’ll do my best.
He looked down at the annoying hawk, thinking of the fifteen gold he’d spent on his divination orb, of the consolatory looks that Phimos and Deyra would cast him on Moonday morning.
No. It’ll be looks of confusion and awe, directed at each other, when I don’t show up.
His eyes narrowed.
I’ll do my best, and I’ll win.
* * *