Knights Magi (Book 4) (7 page)

Rondal dropped his book on the table in disgust.

“What?” Tyndal asked, alarmed.

“DO you mind?” Rondal asked, annoyed.

“Do I mind what?  Thaumaturgy?  Hell
yes,
I mind it!  It’s—”

“Not that,” Rondal said, through clenched teeth.  “Do you mind not reading out loud?  I find it distracting.

Tyndal’s eyes bulged.  “You mean . . . read without . . . without
saying
it?” he asked.

“I do it all the time,” demurred Rondal.  “You don’t
have
to speak the words to hear them in your head.”

Tyndal looked at him skeptically.  “You
don’t?
”

Rondal rolled his eyes.  “No, you mud-brained pud!  You read with your eyes.  You just don’t . . .
talk
.  You
think.
  Just like mind-to-mind communication, only you’re talking to yourself.  Makes things move much faster when your mouth isn’t involved.”

“That’s not been my experience,” Tyndal quipped with a snicker.  His humor was wasted on Rondal.  “But I’ll try it.”

And he did.  To his surprise, he found that
not
vocalizing the words as he read them increased his pace.  Enough so that he wasted precious minutes mentally kicking himself for not thinking of this
ages
ago.  If he just relaxed, and let his eyes move as fast as they needed to . . .

“Hey!” he said, sitting up, suddenly, and forgetting that Rondal wasn’t hearing what he was reading.  “Is this
true?
”

“What?” groaned Rondal.  He hated to be interrupted.  That was one of his more annoying traits, as Tyndal had no compunctions about interrupting, and being upbraided about it was irritating.  Indeed, Tyndal had to admit he enjoyed interrupting Rondal because it annoyed him.

“That the first magi each made up their own
personal
systems of magic?”

“That’s what the text says.  I wasn’t there.”

“So . . . wild magic . . . that’s just what the first magi were doing?”

Rondal sighed, realizing that his brother apprentice wouldn’t leave him to his book unless he explained.  “Right.  Before the Alka Alon stepped in and taught us Imperial magic.  Only that was before the Magocracy, really, so it wasn’t exactly Imperial magic.  It was just . . .
human
magic.”

“So what did the Alka Alon do that was so important if we were already practicing magic?” Tyndal continued to dig.

“They – you know, you
could
just read the text!”

“I’m just looking for context,” Tyndal insisted.  “If the first magi were all wild magi, why did the Alka Alon teach them to be . . . well, civilized about it?”

“It wasn’t a matter of
civilization
,” Rondal explained.  “It was a matter of
standardization
.  If each mage used their personal system of magic then working together – or even teaching magic to anyone else properly – would be hard.  The Alka Alon gave us the means by which to measure the
nature
of magic.  Like figuring out just how much energy it takes to raise one cubic centimeter of water one degree in temperature.  Or to force an empty sphere of space to illuminate.  The Alka Alon gave us a . . . a common language.  Like theirs, only . . . dumber.”

“That . . . that makes complete sense.  How come when you tell me stuff like that I remember it, but when I read it, it just . . .
evaporates?
”

“I don’t know!  Memory spells are Blue Magic, and I haven’t studied that yet!”  Rondal was annoyed – which he didn’t mind – but that caught Tyndal’s attention like a flipped skirt.

“Wait, there are
memory spells?
”

Rondal groaned and slammed his book shut.  “Yes!  Blue Magic!  The magic of the mind and the consciousness!  You are the loudest silent reader I’ve ever seen.  I think I’ll go read in the courtyard!”

“Memory spells,” Tyndal said, thoughtfully, as he ignored Rondal’s huffy retreat.  “I had no
idea
. . .”

*
                            *                            *

Tyndal spent the rest of the day in the library, only he wasn’t reading any of the books on Mistress Selvedine’s list.  Instead he was doing something he’d never imagined himself doing in a dozen lifetimes. 

He was doing magical research.  On his own.

It had never occurred to him that there might be spells that could help him
learn
magic.  But the somewhat obscure branch of the Art known as Psychomantics, or more commonly Blue Magic, had a solid and dependable history.  Blue Magic was the sorcery associated with the human mind.

Tyndal quickly discovered that the most elementary texts on the subject were not even found in the Main Library of Inarion Academy.  Most of the discussions on it were in books on other subjects, though the assistant archivist informed him that there was a small but in-depth collection in one of the reserve libraries.  That surprised Tyndal.  He had never suspected the school would even
have
more than one library, but it did.  Indeed, it had six.

There was the distinguished and stately Main Library, which Tyndal admitted, upon reflection,
did
imply that there were
non
-main libraries.  He’d just never thought of it that way.  He even recalled Master Secul mentioning more than one library.  But upon inquiry with the helpful advanced student on duty at the main reference area, he learned that there were in fact
six
libraries at Inarion Academy. 

The student librarian told him of the others: the Master’s Library (off-limits to all but faculty and reputed to be a vast repository of old examinations) and the Scriptorium Library, where commonly-used texts were kept (and where all advanced students could – and were required to, as a condition of their graduation – copy the books for their own use.  And at their own expense, the student explained with disgust).  There was the Enchanter’s Reference Library, a vast technical archive specific to the art, and the Student’s Reserve Library in the basement of the East Tower, where nonmagical works were kept.

And then there was the Manciple’s Library. 

Stuck in an out-of-the-way chamber, the Manciple’s Library was where the more rare works on the more obscure branches of magic were kept.  It was kept under the care and authority of the manciple, not the principle archivist, for reasons of tradition and academic feudal obligation that Tyndal didn’t quite understand. 

But he tracked the man’s student assistant down in his closet-sized office just off the school’s large buttery and begged the key from him, after confirming that it was the campus’s only repository of Blue Magic texts.  The library was located in a spare tower that didn’t look useful, nor particularly decorative, a chamber built for some forgotten purpose and then re-purposed repeatedly over the years.

Now it was the dusty home to hundreds of volumes unlikely to be regularly consulted by the normal students.  Advanced students would sometimes find their way here, but the place was almost unused. 

Tyndal surveyed the scrolls and books around him after floating a bright magelight in the air, and he was suddenly glad that the place was warded against insects and pests.  It was creepy enough as it was without spider webs.  He pushed a pile of scrolls off of the main table in the small library and created a space in the dust, pulling a rickety stool into place.

Then he got to work.  The Main Library archivist had given him the names of a few books or monographs on Psychomancy he could start with, including the helpfully-named
Primer On Psychomancy
, by Master Loden, whoever he was.  Tyndal found the book after ten minutes of searching, and then pounced on it like a free meal.

Quite against his nature he learned he was
fascinated
by the magic of a man’s mind.  He learned how many common spells had a psychomantic component, but that the discipline as such was rarely taught, due to its obscure nature and dubious use.  The well-trained Psychomancer, Master Loden frequently pointed out, could be a menace to society if he lacked good moral character.

Tyndal hoped they weren’t too specific about that.

Blue Magic was the study of the conscious, the subconscious, the dreamworld, the Other World, and of course such basic factors as memory, recollection, learning and knowledge.

Tyndal found himself in awe of the idea of the mind being an objective thing for study, like carbon or pinecones. 

Tyndal found himself staring off into wonder as he appreciated the scope of the discipline.  Master Loden wrote that human consciousness is merely the
accumulated aggregate of experience and memory
. And that made sense to Tyndal. We begin life as an empty sack, he reasoned, and along the way our mind picks up what it needs.  He could relate to an empty sack.

The art of Psychomancy was how to put things into – or take them out of – that sack.  And it was, he discover quickly, much,
much
harder than merely producing flame out of thin air or manifesting a light in the darkness.  Compared to the human mind, the mechanics of the basic magic of manipulating mass and energy were children’s games.

Part of the problem, as Loden explained, was that the Alka Alon, the masters of magic on Callidore, had no cognate for the discipline; the human mind worked differently than the Alka Alon mind, and so outside of some basics in common with both cognitions, they had little to give the humani in that regard.  What had evolved into Psychomancy was largely of human invention.

As was (it was pointed out repeatedly in the text) the science of Theurgy: the magic of the Gods.  The gods of the humani were the aggregate subconscious expressions of humanity clustered around a psychomantic architecture of abstract symbols, based on the needs of humanity.  The human gods could take material form on Callidore, when conditions were ripe and the need was great.  Some had even played a role in history. 

The gods of the Alka Alon or the gurvani, by comparison, were more hallowed ancestors or culture heroes.  The gods of humanity, when they manifested in reality, were magically strange expressions of pure ideals crammed through the combined sources of thousands of minds over hundreds of years.  They could appear or fade from existence as individual entities, reforming later in different form for different needs. 

But they responded, theurgists theorized, primarily to the primal needs of the human mind.  The gods existed because humanity willed them to exist,
needed
them to exist, and Callidore gave them shape.  But it all began in the mind.

Beyond basic theory, which Tyndal was surprised to find fascinating but difficult to accept, Loden also gave some examples of spells of special utility . . . including one that allowed the mage to theoretically remember
every word
of
everything he read
under its influence.

It was built on the third series of Antodine glyphs most Imperial-style magi used, one of the less-common sets dealing with abstract concepts rarely useful for warding away insects or making fire dance on your palm.  Tyndal had never seen much use for the set of glyphs, even as he learned it by rote back in Boval his very first year.

But once he saw them in the light of Psychomancy, suddenly many of the glyphs and sigils began to make a new kind of sense to him.  When viewed in the context of the human mind, then understanding how to invoke a man’s memory or rouse his emotions might, indeed, require a sigil designed to
suggest
or
imply,
for example, as opposed to
command
.

When he figured out the spell’s architecture, he cast it on himself. 

And he remembered every word of the book he’d just read. 

Remembered it as if it was floating there in front of him.

Luin’s liver!  Why the hell don’t the masters teach that one the first day?
he swore silently. 

Then he got started in earnest, with
Bannerbane’s Introduction To Thaumaturgy
and a big grin on his face.  Maybe this wouldn’t be as bad as he thought.

*                            *                            *

After that Tyndal’s exams got a little easier. 

When he met with Master Indan the next morning, he was able to rattle off – nearly by rote – the complex interplay between
Will, Desire,
and
Intent
, and how they differed, according to orthodox magical theory.  By using the Blue Magic spell, he was quoting almost word-for-word from
Bannerbane’s Introduction. 

The words just kept spilling out, as they appeared in front of him, and he interjected just a few
“If I recall correctly,
” and
“I believe Master Minalan said . . .”
variables in each recitation to keep it from sounding . . .
too
scholarly.