Wizard's Blood [Part One]

by Bob Blink

  Mage Buris was old, thin, somewhat short, and a ball of energy and enthusiasm. His hair was short and completely white, along with the smallest of moustaches. His gray eyes were alive with curiosity and intelligence, and his movements were quick and precise, as if he didn’t have time to waste on unnecessary motion. He looked up from a beaker filled with a colored boiling liquid he’d been examining when they walked up.

  “Ah, Ronoran and our off-worlder.”

  He held out his hand, then thought about it and turned off the fire under the beaker, before he turned back with his hand out.

  “Buris,” he said briskly but with a smile all the while looking Jolan up and down for something that might identify him as being from another world.

  Jolan responded with his name and his hand. “You’ve got quite a place here. Makes me feel a bit like I’m back home.”

  “What did you do “back home” since they don’t do magic there.” Buris asked.

  “I was a graduate student in physics,” he responded, wanting to get his credentials established from the start.

  “Just physics?”

  “We tend to specialize there, but I dabbled a bit in chemistry as well. My specialty was kind of borderline.”

  “Back home do you know why this stuff glows in the dark?” He shoved a beaker with a small chunk of material in the bottom.

  “What is it?” Jolan asked.

  “You can’t tell?” Buris asked.

  “Not without running some tests.”

  “Ronoran was right. Your abilities are either stunted or you’re not much of a mage. It’s radium”

  Jolan realized he was being tested. “It’s a spontaneous nuclear reaction,” he said. “A particle is ejected from the nucleus, the core of the radium if you will. The ejection excites a number of the other particles, the electrons in this case, as they return to stable conditions they emit light.”

  Jolan wondered how much was known about the stucture of the atom and whether his somewhat crude explanation meant anything. He looked over at Buris and found him examining him with new respect.

  “You do know a bit about things, don’t you?”

  “I wouldn’t spend too much time around that stuff. It can be dangerous.”

  “Of course it can. I have my shields up. Dragons, you don’t have shields do you?” Quickly he moved the beaker of material away and placed it in a heavy box across the desk.

  “Why do you want to see my sparker bottles?”

  Jolan reached into his pocket and pulled out the iPhone. He showed it to Buris who held out his hand.

  “What’s it do? Odd looking bit of stuff. Never seen anything like it before.”

  “It does a lot of things, but it needs power to work. Not magical power, but the kind that is stored in your bottles. It has a very small “bottle” of his own, but all the energy has been drained from it. I was hoping to use one of yours to transfer energy back into this “bottle” which I call a battery, so it can work again.”

  “Can you do that?”

  “A lot depends on what you have here, but it looks like you have most of what I’d need. I need to get a “bottle” with the right voltage, a bit of conductive wire, and some small connectors. Can I see what you have?”

  That started them on another walk, but soon enough they came to a row of shelves with a variety of containers filled with electrodes and solutions. Jolan now needed to see what was available in terms of voltages. He needed something he could use as a reference.

  “How do you measure the voltage?”

  Buris came back with a metered instrument, which while labeled oddly, looked very much like a voltmeter.

  “Do you have a “bottle” that uses lead electrodes and a sulfuric acid solution?”

  Buris looked at him and nodded. He wandered over to a shelf and came back with a heavy “bottle”.

  “Not one of the better designs,” Buris observed.

  “I know,” agreed Jolan, “but it is something that I know and can serve as a reference.”

  He took the probes from the meter and noted how the small arm deflected.

  “I need something that would cause the meter to deflect to here,” he said, pointing to a point about one third of the deflection. “Either that or a way of splitting the output and tapping off only this much.” Jolan didn’t want to burn the little rechargeable battery up, so he needed some means of obtaining a lower voltage.

  Buris was back a moment later with another “bottle”. “Try this one.”

  Buris knew his stuff, Jolan realized. He’d come back with something that would give him a reasonable voltage. Now he needed to connect things together.

  Ronoran and Buris watched as he carefully pried the back off the iPhone with the tiniest blade in his Swiss army knife. It was still a crude approach, and he scratched the back of the case badly, but eventually he was down to the battery. He pointed to the wires leading from the battery and Buris took his meaning, returning with a spool of insulated wire. Curious, Jolan asked what it was made of.

  “Iron core with a flash of silver,” Buris answered. “Flexible ceram for protection. What do you use?”

  “Usually cuprum,” Jolan responded, and relished the look of shock on both their faces.

  It took some doing but he was able to slip the wire in place, and using a bit of magic for a change, he was able to solder the new wire onto one of the terminals using the small bit of excess solder present on the connector. Buris kindly supplied another spool with a different color coating, and Jolan did the same with the other terminal. Buris, totally intrigued by the strange device, now was an eager participant.

  Once he had the two wires in place, he cut small gouges in the case so the wires could stay in place with the cover reattached, and turned the device over. Time to hook it up to the external battery, and hope. He hooked the two wires to the “bottle” Buris had supplied, and waited a few minutes to allow some charge to hopefully flow into the iPhone’s battery, then with fingers mentally crossed, he turned it on.

  Dragon’s be praised, Jolan thought. It works!

  Chapter 46

  The third week turned out to be an extremely busy one. On the morning of the first day, a couple of members of the council appeared and asked if Jolan could step out from class for a moment.

  “That’s one of them,” Jolan agreed, holding a darkened crystal container roughly the size of a quart milk bottle. “The bottles Cheurt had with him appeared to glow, but they looked exactly like this.”

  “Storage crystals for certain then, just as we suspected,” observed Mage Demili.

  Jolan looked at her with his eyebrows raised requesting a bit more information, although he suspected he knew the answer.

  “They are special crystals that can be charged with the power to provide a user that is isolated from the source the ability to power low consumption magical tasks. They were made in the time before the Wars. We learned of them through a discovery some eighty years ago, when one of the crystals was discovered where it had been buried for nearly a thousand years. It was fully charged, and we discovered the function through the discharge of its stored power.”

  “We’d found a number of the crystals before, but they had always been empty, and various mage researchers had only guessed at their function,” added Mage Bloor.

  “How do you charge them?” Jolan asked, his suspicions regarding the function confirmed.

  “We don’t know,” replied Demili. “We have never been able to determine the procedure, and there has been no mention of them in any of the scrolls that have been found to this point. It is disturbing that Chuert seems to have a large supply of them, which suggests someone in Ale’ald has discovered the means of charging them. They would be most useful in his travels to your world where magical power seems to be thinly distributed, or perhaps not at all in some locations.

  “Thank you. You may return to class, but please make arrangements to be released from lessons on midweek day. We have almost complet
ed arrangements for the probing of your mind to investigate the nature of the “pairing” damage as we discussed some days back. Perhaps we can get past this interference to your advancement.”

  So, his instructors were passing the word back to the council. The fact he was not progressing was known to all that mattered. He had to hope the tests they wanted to run would have some positive result. He knew they wouldn’t keep him in class forever. He was already a bit of a drag on class progress. His situation was a bit like the student failing to learn the first steps of algebra. At some point continuing in class was pointless for without understanding the first principles, the later material was without meaning.

  After the long lecture from the previous week, Jolan had wondered where the instructors would take the class this week. The first action was to further split the class. The thirty-three members of the novice class were divided into three sections for the mage training, coming back together into one large class for the teaching of mathematics, science, and history.

  Class itself seemed to focus on practice and more practice, but now some new aspects were being filtered in to demonstrate some of the more basic principles of the use of magic. The effects of distance on the spells was the first topic. Everyone in the class could light a candle easily enough. Most could light it across the room, but only the ten-year old was able to light it all the way down the hall. Simply stated, the ability to perform a feat was dependent on how far away the object being acted upon was located.

  They were all encouraged to practice and determine their own personal limits with this specific task. Jolan found he could reach about two-thirds of the way down the hall, and was a bit miffed that a mere ten-year old could kick his butt in this regard. The effort seemed to be mostly a pass or fail test, although near the edges of his ability he did sense a bit more strain trying to accomplish the task. He couldn’t think of a way to quantify the result, so he never was able to determine to his own satisfaction whether the difficulty increased linearly, or as an inverse square, or some partial power. Since he was enough of a distraction, he held off questioning one of the mage-instructors, and thought he’d ask Ronoran or Luzoke when he saw them later.

  The same type of testing was performed with lifting, which Jolan excelled at, handily beating his primary adversary. That she was a girl and young, didn’t take away from his satisfaction. The exercise was somewhat more illuminating in that he could quantize his lifting ability, at least near the extreme limits. Close in he seemed to be able to handily move around any object available for the test, but once he approached his limits he thought the amount he could lift was dropping off linearly. That was good. An inverse square capability would dramatically affect one’s capability at distance.

  The next day they examined the effects of blockage, in other words placing an object between the mage and his target. Neglecting special materials such as cuprum, which they didn’t have any of anyway, everything they tried seemed to have no effect. He could light a candle through three feet of stone without any issues at all. Unless the blockage completely surrounded the object, that is. They were told this was generally true because the magical force was not traveling from the position of the mage to the object, but was forming at the object itself in response to their demand. The barrier between the mage and target therefore only had some effect in those limited number of spells that required the force to be directed from the mage’s location.

  More dramatic was the effect of not being able to see the object under consideration. Being unable to see the object was far more debilitating than any shield they tested. Put the candle behind a barrier Jolan couldn’t see around, and he couldn’t light it to save his life. Everyone else in the class was similarly restricted, but the mage-instructor demonstrated it was still possible, although it took both power and training to accomplish the feat.

  Trying to perform multiple actions at the same time or nearly the same time had the expected effect. He either couldn’t perform any of them, or could only perform poorly the one he tried to focus on. Part of this was said to be practice, and part depended on your mental abilities. Some could learn to mentally time share, while others were always going to be single string operators.

  The end of the day was the perfect time to demonstrate the effects of fatigue. In general, being tired had no effect on his ability to perform any function. Since they weren’t drawing from their own energy, this was the way it should be. Admittedly, once they became tired to the point their concentration wavered, performance started to drop off, but it was typically the inability to perform some function at all rather than degraded ability.

  All of this was well and good, Jolan thought as he pulled out the papers and the iPhone that evening, but unless he started learning something new it wasn’t going to matter. For now though, he put the matter aside and concentrated on the calculations and drawings he needed to complete before the two-day at the end of the week. Now that the iPhone was charged, and he had a means of recharging anytime he needed, he could use the calculator and some of the other applications to help him with certain tasks. By the time he went to bed, he hadn’t made nearly as much progress as he’d hoped.

  “You’ll need to lie as still as possible during the probing,” Jolan was told by someone he’d never met before. He assumed she was the equivalent of a medical technician, although she could have been a full level mage for all he knew.

  He was lying on his back in the center of what he’d call an anechoic chamber, except the material that covered the walls and ceiling were quite different. His table-bed was in the center, and there were three tunnels cut into the material that led toward his head, one at the top of his head, and the others at one hundred and twenty degree angles to the first. At the other end of those tunnels sat three medical-mages who would be performing this test. When he’d entered the room he could see that additional tunnels allowed each of the mages to see the other two at all times, although they were essentially hidden from Jolan, who was supposed to be looking at the small ball above his head anyway.

  “Are you ready to begin?” asked the technician.

  “I guess,” Jolan responded, although the setup was a bit intimidating. He felt like he was about to be blasted with some kind of radiation beams. Mostly he was concerned that he was going to experience a recurrence of the feelings he’d had when Cheurt dug into his brain.

  The technician walked out of the room and turned out the lights. Taking a deep breath, Jolan tried to lie as still as possible. For the longest time it seemed that nothing was happening, and then faintly he felt a kind of tickle inside his head. Resisting the urge to move, he stayed put as directed, and what seemed like a very long time later the lights came back on and the technician walked over to him.

  “That’s it,” she said cheerfully. “You can get up, and I’ll take you to the meeting room. The medical mages will be in to discuss what they have learned in a few minutes.”

  “We think it would be easy enough to remove entirely,” the lead mage told him. “It would be a simple procedure similar to the one you just experienced, although it would last about five times as long. Afterwards, the annoying blockage you’ve been experiencing would be gone.”

  “What else would happen?”

  “You’d be returned to a primary state, ready to advance in a normal manner.”

  “What about the spells and abilities I currently have. Would those be lost?”

  “I don’t know. But you’ve only started, so you would rapidly be able to regain the spells in any event, so it would hardly matter.”

  “I seem to have at least one spell that no one here can duplicate. It seems far beyond what anyone of my level should be capable of. Would that capability be lost?”

  “It might be. This is somewhat new territory, so we can’t be sure.”

  “So, I might become essentially a novice level mage, and be able to progress like anyone else, eventually reaching my limit in a few years.”

  “That’s correct.
It usually takes eight to ten years to develop fully.”

  “What about the spells and knowledge that are stored in there from the wizard I extracted them from?”

  “That would all be lost. We would essentially pull that information out and “reset” the memory cells in that part of the brain.”

  Jolan suddenly knew he wasn’t interested in what they were offering. While the chances were small, the only hope he had of ever triggering the Nexus was resident in that block locked inside his head. He also hoped there might be other information that would help in a showdown with Cheurt at some point. If they threw it all away he was going to have no chance at all against the wizard.

  “Are there any other choices?”

  The lead medical mage shifted around uncomfortably in his chair. “There is a possible procedure that would effectively relocate the information to an adjacent site, thus freeing up the normal areas of your brain to learn in a more standard method. It is risky, and could destroy your mage abilities completely. I don’t recommend it.”

  “When do I need to decide?” Jolan asked, but he already knew what he was going to choose.

  “You have as long as you want. You just will progress no further in your development until this has been done, whichever route you select. By the way, just so you know. We can’t do anything about that other oddity they found in there.”