Academic Exercises (37 page)

By the time I’d done half a dozen double-fold sheets my hand was red raw. I went outside and washed it off in the brook. It was just starting to get dark. We’d brought a dozen of the big field-issue candles, enough to read by for ten hours, and one of those army-pattern closed lanterns. You can see your hand in front of your face, but that’s about it.

All the time I’d been mutilating myself in the cause of scientific investigation, she’d been reading. “Any joy?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Sometimes it’s like it’s just starting to make some kind of sense,” she said, “and then I lose it completely. I
think
it’s supposed to be a reasoned, consecutive argument, but he keeps wandering off, and then it’s just plain weird.”

I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of that. Our department title is, forensic recovery investigation and damage limitation. I had a nasty feeling we were rather too late for the last part of our remit. “I suggest you leave it for tonight and we’ll have a proper go at it in the morning,” I said. I’d wrapped a handkerchief round my hand. My handkerchieves aren’t the cleanest in the world. “I don’t know about you, but I’ve had enough for one day.”

She gave me this look, which I confess I found hard to interpret. “What?” I said.

“Oh, nothing.”

Now I’m a scholar, sworn to the celibate life, wouldn’t have it any other way. But once a year I go home and spend a week with my brother—married for thirty years, two sons, still working the farm—and sometimes his wife says “Oh, nothing” in exactly that tone of voice, and that’s when I make an excuse, take a book and spend a couple of hours reading in the hayloft, because if I was the sort of man who relishes the spectacle of total war, I’d have joined the army instead of the Order. There’s that bit in the General Collect about how you have broken every law, dishonoured every commandment, done every evil, neglected every good. Get a woman to say it and you could compress all that down into ‘Oh, nothing’ and save twenty minutes.

“What?” I said.

“Perhaps you hadn’t noticed—” she was one of those women whose voices get quieter when they’re really angry—”but there’s nothing to sleep on in this horrible building. There’s no beds, there’s no couches—”

“Floor,” I pointed out.

“It’s
freezing
.”

Ah, I thought. Here we go. “No it isn’t.”

“Yes it
is
.” You can’t argue with women about temperature, I’ve noticed. They’re always cold, all of them. It can be hot enough to puddle the nails in the doorframe, and still they’ll moan at you for not lighting the fire. “I’m chilled to the bone, and there’s no fireplace.”

“This isn’t cold,” I assured her. “Where I grew up, you’d be sweating. When I was a kid—”

“I’m not spending the night here,” she snapped. “Not without a proper bed and some heat.”

“No choice, I’m afraid,” I explained, as patiently as I could. “It’s four hours to the village, and you really don’t want to try going down the mountain in the dark.”

“I wasn’t proposing to,” she growled quietly.

I frowned at her. “You’re not suggesting—”

“Yes.”

“No, sorry.” I shook my head. “
Bia kai cratos
is a high-intensity sixth-level transmutation. It takes enormous amounts of energy and creates a force three differential.”

“I know,” she said. “If it was easy, I’d do it myself. But I can’t, so you’ll have to.”

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “This is a highly unstable environment. Diverting that much energy into heat and light could cause a flashover. Wrap up warm in a blanket, you’ll be fine.”

There are various military forms (
mirabile ictu
, that sort of thing) that enable you to kill a fellow human being just by looking at them. Technically they’re quite straightforward—level three—but for obvious reasons they’re not taught until fourth year postgraduate. On the other hand, she struck me as the sort of dedicated student who reads ahead. I was, therefore, tempted to raise a surreptitious shield form. Trouble is, in subdued lighting or darkness you glow slightly. So I did the sensible thing and used
dormienda
under my breath. She was fast asleep in ten minutes. She snored.

A question that’s always coming up in year four end-of-term exams is, why can’t you use
dormienda
on yourself? Answer—well, you know, of course (and if you don’t, stop reading this and
revise
). Annoying; because there are times when you’re lying awake at night and you’d give anything to be able to mutter a few words and drift off to sleep, even if it does mean a headache and slight nausea in the morning. Instead, I made myself as comfortable as I could in one of the horrible chairs and spent the night staring at where the ceiling would be if only I could see it. I remember taking extraordinary pains to stay as still as possible, almost as if there was someone or something else inside the tower with us, which I really didn’t want to disturb. I’d like to report that I spent the time working on some abstruse point of theory. Sadly, no. My mind drifted; various topics, including the refectory roof (I really didn’t want to be on the Works Committee, but sometimes you just get lumbered), the vacant chair in Theoretical Ethics, that nagging pain I get in my jaw, the six hundred angels my brother needed to fix up the mill—a first edition Corbulo would’ve covered that easily, and I’ve heard it said that unscrupulous people know how to fake the watermark using wood blocks, steam and olive oil; the problem was, I didn’t know any unscrupulous people; that sort of thing, the usual garbage that bounces around inside your head when you’re awake in the wee small hours. Also, for some unaccountable reason, our mysterious friend’s choice of reading matter. The textbooks, yes, everybody’s got a Saloninus and a Perceptuus, and the Corbulo—nice to have your own copy, saves waiting your turn in the library. The
Huntsman’s Mirror
, on the other hand, suggested landed gentry rather than your typical poor scholar. By and large, the Order is mostly middle-class; a respectable profession for the sons of merchants, lawyers, doctors, the better class of land agent. We don’t get many scions of the nobility, for some reason. The upper echelons of society simply don’t seem to be fertile ground for the Talent, which I’ve always put down to inbreeding. But you get them from time to time, just as you get peasants’ sons and even women. Or maybe our friend had ideas above his station, or he won the book in a card game. You can’t tell, can you?

The
Garden
, on the other hand. We don’t encourage that sort of thing. In fact, we don’t hold with it at all. Go figure. It really is true what they tell you in first year; you can damage your talent, possibly lose it altogether—look what that sort of thing does to women adepts, after all. A copy of the
Garden
would get you thrown out of the Studium, and even the lesser schools, where they can’t afford to be quite so fussy, would take a pretty dim view. Hence, quite possibly, our man moving away from civilisation and setting up shop in a wizard’s tower in the middle of nowhere. All very sad, and it wouldn’t be the first time.

In which case, we really did need to know what he’d been up to. A corrupted and decadent talent, under the influence of malignant tendencies, decays quickly but nastily, with occasional flashes of exceptional brilliance. It’s not widely known, but half the military forms in the
General Concordance
were developed under those sorts of circumstances, and if you want a classic example, you don’t need to look further than Saloninus himself.

Well, we had his journal; that was the main thing. In cases where the journal’s lost or destroyed, all you can do is reconstruct and guess. Much easier when you’ve got a detailed, scientifically-compiled record of a fellow adept’s mind going all to pieces; you can see where the shrapnel flew, and usually how fast it was going, and possibly what it hit.

“I think we should go back,” she said.

“Really.” I was grinding the brick against a flint to make more dust.

“Well, yes. We should take this back to the Studium and let the experts look at it.”

“I’m an expert,” I said coldly.

She paused, not for very long. “Yes, but some of this stuff is really strange. There’s whole pages that simply don’t make sense at all. I mean, it’s perfectly normal words and phrases, proper grammar and syntax.
Really
good spelling. But it doesn’t mean anything.”

“Not to you.”

She pulled a face. “I really wish I could read some of it out to you, and then you’d be able to see what I mean. It’s
gibberish
. Except sometimes—”

Odd she should put it that way. It’s gibberish, except sometimes. I’d said that once, those exact same words, twenty years ago. Whereupon my field supervisor (Germanus of Met’Oc, rest his soul; a good man and a competent scholar) grabbed the book out of my hands and sent me to fetch him an apple from the refectory. Later, of course, he explained.

“I’d leave it for now,” I said, as pleasantly as I could. “Why don’t you go outside, have a walk, stretch your legs? You’ve been cooped up in here all morning, you could do with some fresh air.”

“It’s tipping down with rain out there. Can’t you hear it?”

“And then,” I said, “I’ll have cleaned off enough parchment and you can start copying out. All right?”

She scowled horribly at me as I closed the tower door on her, but I couldn’t help that. It was for her own good; pneumonia can be cured, but you can come to harm reading allogloss, even if you don’t know what it means. She was going to have to copy it out; that was bad enough.

Just to be sure, I put my hand on the page she’d left it open at and used
spes gentis
. Turned my fingertips numb for several seconds. Allogloss. Oh hell.

Think about what you do when you write something down. You take a thought out of your own mind, you separate it from yourself, and you fix it in a permanent medium, like a fly in amber. Then you leave it there.

A book can last a very long time. Even if the paper you wrote on is lost or destroyed, all it takes is for someone else to make a copy. Written words can propagate like maggots in a sheep’s arse. Some flies in amber are only sleeping.

Allogloss is worse than that. You make it using a form I don’t know and don’t wish to learn. What you write
changes
; it disguises itself. A non-adept looks at it and just sees nonsense. It’s like a code, but it’s truly unbreakable, unless you know the appropriate form,
moi aeide
. Once you use the form, allogloss wakes up. The words (more to the point, a little bit of the mind that wrote the words) can talk to you. Ten people reading a page of allogloss will read ten very different texts—the meaning is exactly the same, but the phraseology, even the language it’s in—will be completely different. Allogloss is not a toy. It’s toxic.

Nothing wholesome was ever written in allogloss; nothing anyone ever wanted to read. There’s a school of thought, to which I’m tempted to adhere, that says the only place for allogloss texts is the back of a lit grate.

Sadly, I had no choice. She was going to have to copy it out, and I was going to have to read it. What fun.

The first passage went something like this; or at least, this was the sort of thing I heard in my head. I’m not sure to this day how much of it’s him and how much is me. I’ve tried to make it sound like him, but pretty soon you reach a point where the distinction gets blurred, and believe me, that’s not an experience I’d wish on anyone.

Read on. Enjoy.

I met her when I was thirty-three years old and she was, what, seventeen, eighteen. She was a classic case of late onset, but fiercely talented. Her name was

I really do believe that talented women should be treated properly, given genuine opportunities. We make all sorts of excuses, we abuse and exaggerate the evidence—sure, some of it’s perfectly true; their talent’s more fragile than ours, so what? That means we should help them more, not less. Wherever it occurs, the talent is precious and wonderful, and someone who’s got it is special. Someone with as much of it as she had is a miracle, an extraordinary gift to the world. Any other attitude is simply barbaric.