Firehurler (Twinborn Trilogy)

by J. S. Morin

  Kyrus eventually decided that he would have to rewrite his notes as he went along. After some time and a trip back downstairs to retrieve a quill, ink, and more paper, he set about trying to figure out the mysteries of the universe. He took a deep breath to calm himself, then went over and closed and shuttered the windows. He was left with only the light of a single candle on the desk. He sat down and blew the candle out, and the room was suddenly pitch dark.

  “Aleph kalai abdu.”

  A warm yellow glow lighted the room, as if a cheery fire shone in a hearth, except this light did not flicker as would a fire, cheery or otherwise. It lit the room fully and effectively, banishing shadows from all but the farthest reaches under the bed, and certainly removing from the ambiance any hint of the creepy, macabre, or occult—or so Kyrus hoped. There was still some part of him that rebelled against the possibility that this was actually happening, that he was not actually tapping into forces of unknown origin and moral character. A brightly lit room to work in made it seem more scientific, like being a chemist, or an astronomer—No, wait, that does not work at all; they work nearly exclusively in darkness. No matter. Kyrus had felt the rush of cool aether invigorating his mind as a reminder that he knew this power and had already plumbed its shallowest waters. It was time to test somewhat deeper waters.

  “Baru bedoessi leokl kwatuan gelana.”

  Kyrus remembered the accompanying gesture much more clearly than the gibberish the magician in his dreams had spouted and thus swept his hands inward and then upward.

  Nothing happened. Kyrus had some small hope within him that it would have worked on the first try, but he was not so fortunate. He squinted back down at his notes and tried to figure out where he had guessed wrong at his own writing. He tried also to remember from his dream how everything had sounded, felt, looked, as the spell came together.

  “Baru bedaessi leokl kwatuan gelana.”

  Still nothing. Perhaps that first “b” was supposed to have been an “n”?

  “Naru bedaessi leokl kwatuan gelana.”

  Again, there was no result. But Kyrus was not easily deterred. He pored over the letters and phrases, trying to see how his half-sleeping self had been forming letters by comparing them to words he could figure out.

  Several more attempts later, and …

  “Haru bedaessi leoki kwatuan gelora.”

  Success! The spoon on the desk lifted to chin height and hung there, suspended by aether. In his dream, it appeared that there was nothing holding up the plates and pans his unwitting mentor had levitated, but here in the waking world, Kyrus could feel and “see” the aether as it supported the spoon, with wisp-like tendrils of the magic stuff tethering it to him. Kyrus stared at it in wonder.

  After the initial mesmerizing effects of his newfound magic passed, Kyrus reached out and gently touched the spoon. It drifted away from his finger as if it were a toy boat on a still pond. The magic seemed to be holding it somewhat level in the air at a constant height but did not prevent it from floating about. Kyrus gave it a bit harder push and could not help giggling as it bounced off the wall and ricocheted awkwardly back in his general direction.

  Kyrus caught the spoon as it returned, and steadied it in the air, leaving his hand beneath it. He reached his mind back into the aether and sucked in what was wrapped around the spoon. Just as it did with his lights, removing the aether ended the magical effect. The spoon dropped smartly into the palm of his hand. He clenched it in a fist.

  “Ha! I am getting good at this.”

  Kyrus beamed. Ash, unnoticed on the bed behind him, could not disagree. Kyrus turned the spoon over in his hand and examined it. It seemed unharmed. The wispy tendrils of aether had left no trace on the spoon, neither of physical nor an aetherial nature—as best as his knowledge of aether allowed.

  Kyrus set the spoon back down gently on the desk and repeated the incantation. It lifted off the desk, same as before. Kyrus reached for his quill and a fresh sheet of paper and began writing out the spell properly. He noted the inflection of each syllable he had used, and began to write out a detailed description of the gesture but stopped short; he intended to experiment with the subtleties of the spoken component of the incantation as well as the motions, and a lengthy longhand accounting was going to be cumbersome. He needed some quicker symbology for his work.

  Kyrus paused a moment to think of what he should start out with. He held no illusion of coming up with a perfect solution straightaway. He expected that he would refine his methodology, and that it would improve along with his newfound mystical talents.

  He began to draw a pair of hands, held apart, just as they would be when the spellcasting began. However, he noticed a problem almost immediately. Despite his extensive expertise at writing, he was no artist. The blotchy little squiggles that appeared on the paper more resembled a glove—discarded and trodden into ill-repair in the gutter of a thoroughfare—than of a human hand. His sense of perspective was awful, and the fingers were uneven, differing in length and thickness, with no anatomical analog to where they seemed to bend. Despite several attempts, he saw no way that an uninformed observer would ever decipher what motions he was trying to portray.

  Slightly discouraged, Kyrus decided to have a little fun.

  “Haru bedaessi leoki kwatuan gelora.”

  He levitated the pages that held his poor attempts at documentation, lifting them as easily as he had the spoon. They began to drift slightly, as even his breath was enough to set them adrift, but he reached out and steadied them a bit. Then, reaching into the aether, he drew some of the magic essence into himself. Not using it for any spell, he just refocused it on the paper. Remembering the heat such an action produced, he was unsurprised when, before long, the paper smoldered then caught fire. He watched the aether around the paper lose its grip as paper turned to ash, and ash sprinkled to the ground, cut loose from the bit still unburnt. Eventually there was nothing left unburnt, and the aether no longer held anything at all.

  Brushing aside the need to figure out how best to document his research, Kyrus figured on spending the rest of the evening playing and practicing. There would be time to be a scientist and wizard later. He might well wake up the next morning and find that his powers had disappeared as swiftly as they had been discovered, or so he told himself; he ought to enjoy it a bit at least.

  Kyrus tossed the spoon in the air, quickly repeating the incantation: “Haru bedaessi leoki kwatuan gelora.”

  He lifted his palms and finished the spell just before the spoon touched the floor. With the spoon hovering a handspan above the floorboards, he slowly continued to raise his hands, trying to get the spoon to rise higher. The spoon did a fair impression of his own movement, moving up as fast as he moved his hands, just as he had hoped. Kyrus extended his arms fully above his head, then got up on his toes; the spoon was nearly waist high.

  Kyrus lowered his hands again and was able to set the spoon down on the floor. He repeated this game a few more times, finding that he could move it not only up and down, but to the side as well. He kept at it for longer than he had meant to and was interrupted by his light abruptly winking out of existence.

  “Aleph kalai abdu” and a quick circle with his fingers, hardly given any thought, turned the room to near daylight again.

  “Hmm,” muttered Kyrus, “maybe that one would be better to start with.”

  With that, he sat down at the desk again and attempted to write out the spell. Startled by the sudden disappearance and reappearance of the light, Ash sneaked across the room and up into Kryus’s lap, seeking comfort.

  “Well hello there, old boy. Did not like that little eclipse, did you?”

  Kyrus reached down absentmindedly to pet Ash and noticed something unusual. While he was aware that his own body gave off aether, he was just noticing how much Ash emitted. It was considerably more than Kyrus had seen other people produce, even more so if one were to consider the size of his much smaller body. Kyrus had surreptitiously watch
ed passersby to see what they and so many other things looked like in the aether. A lack of perspective prevented him from getting a good sense of his own Source’s output of the stuff. He could not help but wonder if the fairy tales—with their talk of witches’ familiars and keeping cats—did not hold some element of truth behind them. He could easily see how keeping such a strong source of aether around could be useful. It would be like a farmer working the most arable land available, or brigands lying in wait on the most lucrative trade routes.

  Still pondering this new revelation, Kyrus began jotting down his trusty light spell on the paper in front of him. As Kyrus tore his gaze from the lazy miasma of aether wafting out of the cat in his lap, he decided to have another stab at notating spell gestures. He blinked at the paper in front of him though, not immediately recognizing what he had just written. There were strange, otherworldly symbols on the page that he did not quite recall meaning to write. They were in no language he had ever written, and yet he knew quite well what they said. Aleph kalai abdu, with unique symbols that conveyed not only the sounds, but pitch, inflection, and relative quickness of each syllable. Intermixed were other symbols that had no pronunciation: these were the notations that described, in quite adequate detail, the motions that were required for the spell. Kyrus’s hand had done it nearly of its own accord, as if it were so rote an activity as writing his own signature.

  Kyrus was a scribe, and long years of practice had long since dissociated the thought of writing from the act of writing. A word existed in his mind, and when he willed it to paper, his hand knew what to do. He did not concern himself over what strokes of the quill went into making a Q or an F; he had progressed past the stage of having to consciously worry about those minor details long ago. If he was copying something, he almost did not need to think at all. His eyes would see the words, and his hand would repeat them. This, though, was new. Not only had he not really thought specifically about what he was writing, he wrote something he had never seen before. That was puzzling. Even more puzzling was that it was so easy for him to understand its meaning.

  Slowly and deliberately, Kyrus lifted his quill. Staring suspiciously at the strange text he had written, he attempted to duplicate it just below where he had penned the original. His hand effortlessly went through a series of sweeps and scratches, neatly and professionally. While there were several lines to each symbol he wrote, there was a certain order that just made sense, a flow to the quill strokes that seemed well thought out.

  Kyrus was certain he had done this before. There was no way this was the first time he had used this script, written these symbols, practiced writing out that spell. Somewhere in his memory, memories of dreams long since consciously forgotten, he had done this before, and by the ease with which it came to him, he had done it a lot. The action was rote, unthinking, and easy. Much the way he could knot the laces of his own shoes, his hands knew better what to do than did his mind.

  Initially the thought of a repository of knowledge, contents unknown and cached away deep in the hidden nooks of his own brain, disturbed Kyrus. But as he pondered it further, he realized that he was not entirely guessing at this whole business. Some part of him, at some level, knew what it was doing, what he was doing. Somewhere, sometime, whether his dreams were real or a prophetic delusion come true, he knew what he was doing. Kyrus had long enjoyed the diversion his dreams offered, but it was the first time he had realized he may have been getting an education all his life as he slept.

  The hour had drawn late and Kyrus experimented and pondered, and he was beginning to notice that his eyes had started to ache and burn with fatigue. He slumped back in his chair and blinked hard a few times and tried to rub the fatigue out of them with his fingers. He did not want to sleep. There was too much new and exciting to discover.

  Pushing back his chair, he disturbed an anxious but comfortable Ash, who had been quite content to curl up in Kyrus’s lap as he worked. Jumping to the floor as the lap he had occupied disappeared from beneath him, the cat followed Kyrus as he headed downstairs to put on a kettle of tea. Kyrus’s steps were a bit heavy and clumsy as he fought back the urge to curl up in his nice soft bed and give up on wizardry for the night. Ash kept back a bit out of prudence, lest he be stepped on.

  Outside the bedroom, night had claimed the rest of the residence. Kyrus had been up and down these stairs thousands of times, though, and was not concerned, darkness and fatigue hardly registering. Nevertheless he would need light to make tea by.

  “Aleph kalai abdu,” and most of the ground floor was lit.

  The tiny rush of aether was refreshing, and Kyrus paused just long enough to consider whether keeping up those little rushes of exhilaration would be enough to keep him awake. He continued down the stair, shaking his head.

  No, I need a good strong tea; at least I know how that works.

  Kyrus poured a kettle of water and dropped in the tea leaves, a mix of exotic herbs that Abbiley had introduced him to at a little shop across town. It was a bitter drink, but it had a really invigorating quality to it. It was imported from faraway Krang, where tea brewing was supposedly elevated to an art form, with most respectable citizens having their own personal blend of leaves and spices.

  The stove was cold, and Kyrus had little patience to start a fire. He held the kettle at arm’s length by its wooden handle and began diverting aether into it. Slowly at first, and ever quicker as he got a feel for it, Kyrus brought the kettle to a whistling boil in mere moments. Kyrus set it atop the stove for a few minutes to let the tea steep, then poured himself a cup.

  The aroma of plants that Kyrus would probably never see in his lifetime filled the room. The sharp, bitter flavor of the first sip he took quickly began clearing his head, first with the hot, steamy vapors, then with a burst of something contained within the mysterious mixture. Kyrus had never met a Krangan, but he was sure the one who had concocted his tea was a genius. Kyrus felt focused and alert by the time he finished the cup, though there was a strange, almost disembodied ache throughout him—fatigue he was now able to set aside and ignore for a while.

  Kyrus walked over to the stove to pour himself another cup to bring upstairs with him as he continued his work, when he caught sight of his work desk. On the corner, stacked neatly, were his pages for the shippers’ bylaws. The original was set next to them separately. Kyrus had been almost interested enough to make himself a ninth copy earlier in the day. Perhaps he had another diversion to keep his spell practice interesting. He took his second cup of the Krangan tea, walked over to his desk, and sat down. Picking up the eight commissioned copies, he set them aside, away from the ink pot and where he intended to try his next experiment; it was far too likely for some small thing to go wrong and he did not want to have to redo an entire day’s work—or research how to remove ink from paper magically.

  Kyrus set up a fresh sheet of paper in front of him alongside the original copy. The original was little more than a set of notes, not needed beyond Kyrus’s use of them, and if something were to happen to them, it could be explained away, at least. Kyrus selected a quill and uncovered his ink well.

  “Haru bedaessi leoki kwatuan gelora.”

  The quill lifted gently off the desk. Kyrus moved his hand slightly, willing the quill to follow his motion, and ponderously guided it through the air and dipped the tip into the ink. He pulled it out again, even managing to gently wipe the excess ink from the tip. He brought it over to the page and began painstakingly crafting letters on the blank whiteness of the paper.

  Kyrus held his hand crooked as if it actually held the quill, rather than it being a handsbreadth away and suspended in midair by an aether that only he, as far as he knew, was able to see. He took his hand through the same motions he would normally use to write, though much more slowly, still unsure of how well the quill and the magic would be able to keep up with him. Letter by letter, though, word by word, page by page, Kyrus sped his hand, and the quill kept pace.

  Kyrus had not paid
so close attention to the actual mechanics of his profession in a long time. He was exaggerating his movements, going through them as technically soundly as he knew in his head they should be. He was aware that his hand had long practice and its own ideas how letters ought to be written, but he was more keenly aware of the quill this time than he was of his hand’s daily activity, and as a result, he was working his hand in ways it was unused to. Halfway through finishing his personal copy of the bylaws, his hand cramped up suddenly.

  The quill kept going. Forgetting the pain in his cramped hand, Kyrus watched in fascination as the quill ignored the movements of his hand—now clenched nearly shut in a spasm—and finished the word he had been in the middle of.

  Kyrus grinned, working his left hand against the knotted muscle in his right to ease the cramp, and concentrated not on the movements of his hand, but on the movements the quill should take. It was awkward at first, and the writing not so crisp and clear as when he had used his own writing as a mental model for the quill to mimic, but he picked right back up where he left off. Faster and faster, Kyrus pushed the quill to see how quickly it could follow his thoughts, and indeed it was quick. Words flew down onto the paper. Trips to the ink pot and back left tiny trails of ink flecks, and Kyrus cared little. Letters were formed haphazardly as the quill was often at a poor angle to write, but Kyrus chalked it up to something he would get better at with more practice.