“Such as?”
“Well, I already told you that this is the secret to the longer lives that wizards used to enjoy,” said his mentor.
Will wasn’t impressed. At fifteen, he still had what seemed to be a lot of years ahead, and he couldn’t imagine anything worse than the torture of his grandfather’s training. “Is that it? I get to live twice as long? It doesn’t seem to have done you much good.”
“What does that mean?” said his grandfather suspiciously.
“You’re bitter, mean, and you look like something the dog dragged in on a bad night.”
Arrogan’s face remained smooth for a second, then he smiled. Over the past year, Will had learned that the old man liked insults almost as much as compliments. “Well, that’s true, I suppose,” he replied. “But consider this. You’re not just going to outlive regular people, but you’ll outlive today’s lazy wizards by an even bigger margin. The way they work shortens their lives, rather than extending it. Think about what you did for that boy, Jack.”
“Joey,” corrected Will.
“Joey, jackass, whatever he was called,” said Arrogan, waving one hand. “Think about how you felt afterward; imagine what your turyn looked like. You exhausted yourself. What would happen if you did that now?”
Will thought about it for a minute. “The same thing. If I used up most of my turyn, even if it wasn’t from my source, I’d still be exhausted until it recovered.”
“With what you know now, that’s true,” admitted his grandfather. “But you would recover much faster, and you could cope with the temporary deprivation far better. What do you think one of those fools from Wurthaven would do?”
He could still remember their previous conversation on the topic, when the old man had showed him the candle flaring brighter. “He’d increase his turyn production for a while.”
“And shorten his life in the process,” spat Arrogan.
“Better than being so tired you can’t move,” argued Will.
“Since you like tests so much, why don’t we try it?” said his grandfather suddenly. “You never believe what I tell you, so we might as well make a lesson of it.”
Seeing the light of evil mischief appear in the old man’s eyes, Will started to run, but the green line caught him before he could take more than half a step, and he was paralyzed again. Arrogan caught him as he started to fall and eased him to the ground. He set Will’s candle on his chest. “Keep an eye on this. I think you’ll find it interesting.”
Arrogan stepped back and then held his left hand out toward his grandson before clenching it into a fist and pulling it backward. Will felt—and saw—the mass of turyn that emerged from his body. It followed the green line and stopped to hover around the old man’s fist. Arrogan looked at it for a moment and then waved his hand as though trying to get rid of a bad smell, dispersing Will’s turyn.
Will felt an intense exhaustion sweep over him, as he’d expected, but it began fading almost immediately. After just a few minutes, he was merely tired, and through it all the tiny flame on his candle remained steady, neither growing nor shrinking.
“Let’s do it again,” said his grandfather.
No! thought Will. Not again, not so soon. Are you trying to kill me? Unfortunately, he was unable to voice his objections.
Again the old man sucked the very life out of him, and Will was overcome with a bone-deep fatigue. A few minutes later, he did it again. “You would have been incapacitated for days after this when you first came to me,” lectured the old man. “Now you can recover most of your turyn from the environment in just minutes, and you can do it over and over again. I’ll show you something even more interesting this time.”
He drew out Will’s turyn once more, but this time rather than dispersing the energy, he brought it close to Will’s body and released it. Rather than fading away, the cloud of turyn was drawn back into his body, as though a wind was blowing it toward him. Seconds later, Will’s exhaustion faded.
“In the presence of higher concentrations of turyn, you can recover much faster,” declared his grandfather. He snapped his fingers and released Will then.
Sitting up, Will brushed the dirt from the back of his tunic and gave the old man a sour look. “Every time we have a discussion, I wind up frozen while you perform experiments at my expense.”
“All in the name of education,” said Arrogan. “Besides, training an apprentice is a real pain in the ass. The only bright spot is that I get to have a little fun now and then.”
Back on his feet, Will still felt tired, but it wasn’t anything he couldn’t deal with.
His grandfather pointed at the jar that supposedly contained troll urine. Will still hadn’t decided whether he believe him on the identity of the contents, though. “You’ve had enough training for one day. After you spread the troll piss around the garden, you can rest for the afternoon.”
“Yuck,” commented Will. “I think I’d rather train.”
The old man shook his head. “So far we’ve only talked about turyn and its source, but there’s another important factor, something I call ‘will.’ Your will is a lot like a muscle. Training it to control your source makes it stronger—performing magic makes it stronger—but it has a limit. Push yourself too hard for too long and your self-discipline will crumble.”
“How do you know when it’s running out?” asked Will.
“You get irritable,” said his grandfather. “Easy things seem difficult. Your mind feels fuzzy. That’s if you’re lucky enough to notice in time. Sometimes it falls apart so quickly that by the time you realize you’ve overdone it, it’s too late.”
“What happens then?”
“Depends on what you’re doing at the time. If it’s something big, the result can be bad, or even fatal,” said Arrogan.
Chapter 18
Summer passed into winter, and Will turned sixteen without much fanfare. He wasn’t even sure if his grandfather knew when his birthday was. The old man had never asked, and Will never brought it up.
Will went through two more cycles of having his turyn forcibly reduced, and while it was unpleasant each time, it was never as bad as the first had been. The flame on his candle was no longer even a flame—it more resembled an ember, much like his grandfather’s. He hoped that meant he wouldn’t have to go through any more compressions.
“We’re done squeezing the life out of me, right?” asked Will, as the next summer drew to a close.
“Yeah,” said his grandfather. “No one’s ever gone farther than that, though I’m tempted to try since I have you as a test subject.”
“Why haven’t they gone farther?”
“They all died,” said Arrogan in a bland tone. Then his eyes lit up. “I’m game to try, though, if you want.”
Will gave him a sour look. “No thanks. Does this mean you’ll be taking the spell-cage off soon?”
“Hah!” barked his grandfather. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You lazy little prick.”
Will sighed. “I knew it was too much to hope for. What’s next then?”
“Well, since you’ve got enough nerve to ask, you must be ready. Next, you’ll learn how to increase your available turyn,” said his guardian.
“You have to take the spell off then,” said Will. “I have to keep my source tightly clamped off as long as it’s in place.”
“That’s where you’re mistaken. The turyn you use now doesn’t come from your source. Your body has learned to maintain itself without your source. What you’ll do next is increase what you draw from your environment.”
“This is going to hurt, isn’t it?” said Will bleakly.
“It shouldn’t,” said Arrogan, “but I wouldn’t put it past you to screw it up somehow.”
“Can I ask what the point of this is?”
“You can ask, but it won’t help you succeed, and you wouldn’t understand either, so don’t bother. It will make sense later. What you need to do is push your turyn outward, sort of like you did w
hen you healed that boy.”
It sounded simple. “That’s it?” said Will.
Arrogan just smirked. “Try. We’ll see how far you get.”
An hour later and Will wanted to pull his hair out. No matter what he tried, nothing happened. It wasn’t that he was struggling with a difficult task—he couldn’t even begin, and his grandfather’s advice was worse than useless.
“Imagine it flowing out through your hands. That helps some people,” said the old man. When that didn’t help, he offered different instructions. “Think of it like an empty wineskin. You’re trying to push your breath out and inflate it.”
After the second hour, Will was ready to give up. “Why don’t you just take control like you did before? You do it and I’ll learn from that.”
The old man shook his head. “What I did before was compress your turyn, so it would fit within the spell-cage. You had to learn how to keep it that way on your own. This is almost the opposite of that.”
That gave Will an idea. Forcing himself to release his inner grip on the source of his turyn might give him more power to work with. He was rewarded moments later when a sensation of intense pain built within him. He clamped down on his source immediately.
“Fool,” remarked his grandfather. “You have to use the turyn you’re absorbing, not the turyn from your source. That’s why the spell-cage stays on, so you don’t develop sloppy technique.”
“I hate you sometimes,” said Will honestly.
The old man grinned. “Time for some staff sparring, then. You can try this again tomorrow.”
He didn’t have any better luck the next day, the next week, or even that month, and to make matters worse, his grandfather delighted in taunting him about his failure. “The first-year students at Wurthaven learn to do this during their first week. It’s the most basic step to creating magic. They don’t even let them start learning the runes until they manage this,” teased the old man.
Will was sitting down in the yard in front of the house, doing his best to concentrate. He was sweating in the heat, and a swarm of gnats seemed to have decided he would make great company. “Can you leave me alone?” he complained. “I can’t focus.”
Arrogan walked a slow circle around him. “Focus? A child could do this. If you weren’t such a moron, you’d have done it by now. Stop thinking so hard and just do it!” He stopped in front of Will and a strange expression crossed his face.
As Will inhaled, he was assaulted by the stench of something akin to rotten eggs. When he glanced up, he saw the old man watching him, and on seeing his reaction, Arrogan burst into laughter.
His frustration boiled over, and for a moment the world turned red. Within him, his anger churned and twisted, spinning until he could feel it as an almost physical object. Snarling, he pushed his hand out and his feeling became real; an intense ball of crimson light shot forth toward Arrogan.
The old man’s eyes widened in surprise, and he raised a hand just before the vicious ball of power struck him with a deafening thunderclap. Will was almost blinded by a flash of light, and when his vision cleared he saw his grandfather still standing, his hand outstretched, palm touching the ball of light. Arrogan’s face was a picture of intense concentration and his brow was beginning to bead with sweat.
“You’ve made your point, boy. Let it go. Now!” ordered the old man.
Will was still angry, and it was a second before he realized he was still connected to the energy, that he was in fact pressing it forward against his grandfather’s hasty defense. Meeting his teacher’s eyes, he wondered what would happen if he didn’t relent. I’ll teach the old bastard a lesson. He pushed harder.
Arrogan grunted, and his arm bent under the pressure. “This is why I hate training apprentices,” he growled under his breath. Sticking his left hand out to one side, he sent a red line of power out. It flowed with fluid grace and began to circle Will’s ball of focused hatred.
Will felt his control beginning to slip as whatever Arrogan was doing began to eat into his spell. His anger turned to panic as he felt his determination falter.
“Let it go, boy!” commanded his grandfather. “You’re just making it worse. If this goes much further, I won’t be able to contain it, and I guarantee that I won’t be the one who winds up a smoldering pile of ash. My kindness only goes so far.”
Unsure what he was doing, Will let go of his anger and tried to relax. As he did, he felt something snap within him, and pain shot through his body. Gasping, Will fell sideways and lay on the ground. Looking up, he saw his grandfather still struggling with the ball of turyn he had somehow conjured. It was growing smaller by the second, with streamers of light trailing behind it like smoke as the old man guided it into a circle around his body. He seemed to be pulling energy from it as it traveled.
Arrogan’s hair was standing out from his head, and to Will’s eyes the old man seemed to glow with light that was shining through his skin. He grew brighter as the ball shrank, and wisps of steam began to rise from his body. When he could hold no more, he sent the now-diminished sphere away from the house, directing it into the forest. After traveling thirty feet, it struck a large oak and exploded, sending splinters of wood in all directions.
Will’s ears were ringing so loudly he had trouble hearing anything else, but after a moment he asked, “Are you all right?” His grandfather was still standing in the same place, panting heavily and glowing like a piece of iron fresh from the forge. Then the old man took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. Flames sprang from his body, forming a shell of fire around him that slowly expanded before vanishing.
Arrogan sat down in the dirt, staring at Will. Streaks of red painted his face and arms where splinters had struck him, and he had begun to bleed. “Do I look all right to you?” spat the old man.
Will was having troubles of his own as a familiar pain began to build in him. He had lost control of his source, and no matter how he tried, he couldn’t clamp it shut again. “I think something’s wrong with me,” he stated, trying to hide his panic.
“Your will is broken,” commented his mentor. “Jackass.” Raising one hand, he made a quick gesture and Will felt the spell-cage within him disappear. The pain vanished with it.
Letting his neck relax, Will’s head sagged back to the ground. “Thank you.”
“Nothing’s ever easy with you,” observed his grandfather. “You could have set something on fire or created a light show. No, you had to try and blow us both to hell and back.”
“To be honest, I was only trying to blow you to hell and back,” said Will, coughing into the dirt.
“Next time distract me first,” said Arrogan. “If I see it coming, I’m just going to feed it right back to you and find a new apprentice.”
“Is that what you were trying to do?” asked Will.
The old man snorted, reaching up to wipe away the ash that was all that remained of his eyebrows. “No. If I had, you’d be dead already. I was trying to defuse the anomaly you created, but you were fighting me all the way.”
He wasn’t familiar with that word. “Anomaly?”
“Accidental spell anomaly,” said Arrogan. “Which basically just means you created something nobody’s got a name for. If you want to give it a name, I suggest ‘the idiot’s ugly fucking death ball.’”
“You think I can do that again?”
His grandfather shook his head. “Shit like that isn’t reproducible. It’s too random.”
“When you were learning, what did you do?” asked Will, suddenly curious.
“I levitated my master.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad,” said Will.
“She would have disagreed with you. I sent her into a stone ceiling so hard it nearly broke her neck,” said Arrogan, chuckling at the memory. “Served her right.”
“Does something like that happen with every student?”
“God, no!” said Arrogan. “Most of the time it’s not a huge problem—things like changing color, innocuous stu
ff. But I have seen worse.”
“Like what?” asked Will.
“My last student, a guy named Valmon, he unleashed a really weird anomaly. It looked like a black spark, but it kept growing on its own, as though it was alive. I don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t taken it apart, but it might have continued getting bigger and killed a lot of people. This was in a city, mind you,” said the old man.
“If he was younger than you, is he still alive?”
“No,” said Arrogan, his tone flat.
Will’s head was pounding, and he knew he wasn’t in any shape to stand up, so he kept asking questions. “What happened to him?”
His grandfather blanched, his expression one of profound unhappiness. Eventually, he answered, “He did well, for a hundred years or so, then we had a philosophical disagreement. I killed him.”
Shocked, Will could only mumble, “Oh.”
“Don’t take it to heart, boy. When you get as old as I am, you collect bad memories like a dog collects fleas,” said his grandfather.
“Anything I should know so I can avoid that sort of ending?” asked Will.
The old man laughed. “Don’t piss me off, and don’t mess with my daughter.”
Will immediately thought of Tailtiu and blushed.
“I know what you’re thinking,” said his grandfather. “It wasn’t Tally; she hadn’t been born yet. It was my oldest, Ethnia. She was human. But while we’re on the subject, don’t get any funny ideas about Tally. I know she’s amoral, nearly immortal, and wears less than a whore in Cerria, but as my student I expect you to keep your distance.”
“She’s my aunt, too,” reminded Will. “Is Tally a nickname?”
Arrogan snorted. “She’s so many generations removed you’re probably more closely related to the people in the village than you are to her. Not that it matters; she isn’t human. And the reason I don’t use her name is that she might choose to show up if I do.”
“How did that happen, exactly? If you don’t mind me asking,” said Will. “She has to be at least half-human, doesn’t she?”
The Choice of Magic Page 14
