The Fire Mages

by Pauline M. Ross

  There were seven mages at Ardamurkan. Two were only paper mages, that is, they could use their power to infuse the paper, ink and quills used to create spellpages but nothing more. The rest were thought mages. They all had a vessel to power their magic – an object of some kind where magical energy was stored during the renewal. Cal’s was a teardrop-shaped stone of some sort, another mage had a crystal, a third a carved piece of wood, and one carried a gemstone in the handle of her walking stick. Cal was ranked third of the seven, although I wasn’t sure why, for he was the youngest by some years. Usually only the first two would be called upon to offer advice or perform spells for the nobles at the Hall, but Cal was some kind of distant cousin to the Kellon, so he was often summoned as well.

  ~~~~~

  I was no longer required to wear a uniform, and one sun I wore a particularly shabby and patched tunic I’d brought from home when I first travelled to Ardamurkan.

  Cal looked me up and down disdainfully. “You know, you look more bedraggled than a sheep ready for the shearer. I half expect to see feathers or bits of straw dripping from you. Don’t you have any less disreputable clothes?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “And it hasn’t crossed your mind to get some? Surely even a village girl would be ashamed to wear such rags.”

  “I’d love to, but I have no money until I can earn some.”

  “You have your drusse allowance.”

  “It’s paid quarterly in arrears.”

  “Well, if you want to come with me when I go to the Hall, you’ll need something decent. You’d better go to my fellow; he’ll sort you out. Tell him to send me the bills, and I’ll take it out of your allowance later.”

  “Are you going to put me in skirts?”

  “I don’t give a monkey’s pip what you wear as long as you don’t look like a goose girl.”

  “Then thank you, Lord Mage.”

  “And don’t fucking call me that.”

  Yet he abused me just as much when I called him Cal. His proper name was much longer, for he came from a branch of the Drashon’s family originally, but mages are allowed to choose a new name for themselves when they attain their powers. He called himself Cal, from a very famous mage in history known as Calmander, although his birth title still appeared on official documents.

  He was an odd creature, mercurial and unpredictable. One moment he would be a writhing mass of energy, filled with enthusiasm, the next he would snarl at everyone or be sunk in despair. He was consistently unpleasant to me, from brusque to outright rude. I didn’t mind; nothing could puncture my joy in life.

  There were odd outbreaks of kindness from him. When he first showed me my bedroom, a space somewhat larger than my parents’ entire house, filled with beautiful polished wood furniture and silk wallpaper, he said rather awkwardly, “Look, Kyra, I hope you won’t be too unhappy here. If you want anything, just ask.” Then he swept out. And to my surprise, he had not returned. Each night I slept in the vast, softly enfolding bed, quite alone.

  The mages’ house was a great rambling place with wings bursting out in all directions, meandering in an unstructured way up the hill, surrounded by a wilderness of a garden and a high wall. The seven mages all lived and worked there, together with spouses, drusse, children, pupils and an astonishing number of servants, with guards who came and went with silent efficiency. Although two of the mages, a brother and sister, mostly kept to their own apartments with their families, the rest shared many communal rooms, eating together and wandering through the overlapping spaces haphazardly the rest of the time. If there was any systematic routine to their habits, I never discovered it.

  It was a delight to me to live amongst such people. I’d never realised before just how different I’d felt when I was only a village girl struggling to pay her way. Now I lived in a fine house, with enough wood to burn all year round, wearing better clothes than my mother. I loved the food, too: rich game meats, delicate fish, light sauces, bizarre things in shells, exotic fruits and vegetables grown in hothouses for the tables of the nobility. I ate everything, relishing the change from the pies and pasties of the village, and the dumpling-heavy stews at the scribery. There was wine, which I learned to drink, and spirits, which I avoided after one ghastly experiment.

  The boards had another attraction, too, for I was able to learn from the mages’ discussions. In my innocence, I had imagined myself sitting at Cal’s feet while he gently imparted his wisdom and knowledge to me, but in fact he taught me nothing. His only concession to his patronage was to allow me to follow him on his duties, which he was contractually obliged to do. But the evening board discussion was always lively, and although it revolved around domestic trivia more often than not, occasionally I gleaned nuggets of interest.

  Two of the other mages had pupils, although they were both fifth year and their debates were sometimes very abstruse. Cal also had a fourth year pupil, Raylan, but he was a morose man who said very little to anyone and nothing at all to me. He was useful, though, for each morning board he would interrogate Cal on his plans for that sun, down to hours and exact meeting places, so it was easy for me to decide when to attach myself to the mage and when I could follow my own schemes.

  ~~~~~

  A moon after I became a drusse, my formal training began again. The third year at the scribery was very different from the first two. The drudgery of learning scripts and endless practice was now behind me, and I no longer had to work to pay for my keep. I spent two mornings each ten-sun in contract law lectures, and one adding the new range of spells to my repertoire, but the rest of my time was my own, to study or to follow Cal about, as I wished.

  I needed to earn some money of my own, though, as my drusse allowance was already spent on finery. Since I was now a fully qualified transaction scribe, I passed a few afternoons in the public Scribing Hall, where anyone could come for scribing services. Most of my cohort, richer than I, had already spent time there, becoming known to the other scribes and working their way into partnerships, but I had been tied to the laundry or the mirror room, so this was my first experience of professional scribing.

  It was a big building, divided up into a series of smaller rooms for different functions, each of them crowded and noisy, with jostling queues and outbreaks of shouting or squalling babies. I was assigned to one for simple transactions, no spells, and very dull it was, especially as I soon discovered that the senior scribes did most of the work and therefore took most of the money. I made a few pieces here and there, but it was not very profitable to me.

  One sun, however, while taking a shortcut between market squares in town, I came across a discreet little Scribing House in a narrow alley with a sign in the window: “Transaction or contract scribe required to help out occasionally”. I went in. A tiny middle-aged woman, thin as a quill, bustled forward to greet me. She took me in at a glance – the new expensive and fashionable clothes, the drusse earrings. She bowed.

  “How may I help, Lady?”

  My heart sank. She thought I was just a customer. “I wondered – I mean, the sign in the window...”

  “Oh.” Her face changed from politeness to interest, and her glance fell to my scribe’s necklace. “You’re – a transaction scribe? You want to work here? But perhaps it’s just a bit of practice you’re after – to keep your hand in?”

  “No, I need the money,” I blurted. “Money of my own, I mean. My allowance—” I waved a hand over my stylish woollen trousers, made for me at vast expense by Cal’s own tailor. The two outfits and coat I’d ordered would consume almost my entire first quarter’s allowance. I loved wearing them, but it was expensive to look like a lady.

  “And your drusse-holder has no objection?”

  “He doesn’t care what I do.”

  She laughed, a melodic trilling like a bird. “Come through to the back. I have a pot steeping.”

  Ardamurkan folk always had a pot steeping, I’d found. The contents varied wildly according to taste and the herbs ava
ilable, but there was always something hot to drink. So we sat and drank and the deal was done. Marisa was a transaction scribe, and her daughter, Elissana, was a contract scribe who had recently had a baby, so they needed extra help. They didn’t mind when I went there – two or three afternoons every ten-sun was fine, whatever I could manage. Best of all, they dealt with every kind of business appropriate to their status, and although one or other of them loitered close-by at first whenever I dealt with a client, they soon came to trust me.

  How wonderful it was to write my first true spellpages and be rewarded with silver pressed into my hand. I felt very grown up. The Scribing House was part of the neighbourhood, and everyone who came in seemed to know Marisa and Elissana, and they soon came to know me, too. For the first time since I’d arrived at Ardamurkan, I felt as if I belonged.

  It was not all easy, though. One couple came in for a spell for their daughter’s baby, who had been born ill. It was weak, and had trouble breathing and a blue tinge about the lips. There were no spells specific to such a condition, except for one long marked as being unlikely to be effective. It was an odd thing that no one was able to rationalise, but quite a few spells which once worked perfectly well had lost their efficacy over time. I explained this to the couple, but they wanted me to try it anyway.

  “If it helps even a little bit, it will be worth it,” the woman said fiercely.

  I discussed it with Marisa. “It’s a legal spell,” she shrugged. “We’re allowed to sell it, so long as we warn people. And it might work, you never know.”

  So I scribed the spellpage, watching the letters jump in their sparkling dance, accepted the silver, and helped the couple burn it in the crucible. It flamed exactly as every other spellpage. Three suns later, I arrived at Marisa’s house to find a large box waiting for me containing a gift, a selection of exotic sweetmeats. The spell had worked.

  “It could be coincidence, I suppose,” I said. “Maybe the baby would have got better anyway.”

  Marisa shook her head. “Unlikely, with those symptoms. Don’t agonise over it. Spellpages are always uncertain. The most reliable may fail, the most unpromising may be effective. It’s magic, who knows how it works? Besides – it all enhances our reputation, you know?” And it was true, business was brisker after that and a few customers asked specifically for me.

  Marisa began to hint that perhaps, once I’d qualified as a contract scribe, I might want to join them permanently. Elissana’s drusse had been with them for a while, working half his time with them and half with another, larger, Scribing House. That hadn’t worked out and since then they’d coped with just the two of them, and my occasional help.

  “But I think we could support three Scribes quite comfortably,” Marisa said. “Business is good, just now. And we all get along, don’t we?”

  Looking back on it, that year was perhaps the happiest of my life. I was a proper scribe at last, I was beginning to learn the law, I had money of my own, I had friends I met up with in taprooms and board houses for convivial evenings. I had a real home for the first time since leaving the village, and I was away from Hestanora. She had been taken up by one of the Masters, so I bumped into her in classes from time to time, but there was a pinched look about her. She was pale and had lost something of her snootiness.

  ~~~~~

  Each new year at the scribery brought me access to a wider range of books. The scribery had an extensive collection of spell books, but those for higher ranked scribes were barred to me. I had soon exhausted all those I was allowed to read.

  I turned as always to bookshops. There were several in Ardamurkan, and they all had a number of general purpose spell books, some of them very old. Books of basic spells for general good health or abundant harvests were freely available to anyone, and every house with any pretension to learning kept one or two on hand. A suitable spell could be recited, or written and burned, when there was no money for a true spellpage. Along with a prayer to the Moon Gods and an offering to the forest sprites, it was standard practice for illness or on important occasions like a birth or marriage or the start of a new business.

  I loved whiling away an afternoon with dusty volumes not opened, perhaps, for decades. There was always a chance of turning up interesting variations of a routine spell or new information on long-forgotten practices. Who knew what treasures might lie inside?

  One sun, I went into one of my favourite bookstores for the first time since I became a transaction scribe. The bookseller was a small man, round as an apple, and almost as red.

  “Good afternoon, Lady Scribe Kyra.” He winked, and I smiled at the acknowledgement of my new status.

  “Good afternoon, Master Torlion. Do you have anything new related to harvest spells?”

  “Nothing in the public sections, my dear. Do you want to look in the scribes’ room?”

  “The scribes’ room? I’ve never heard of that.”

  “Ah, well, it’s restricted, of course. But now...” He gestured towards my necklace. “You have a gold chain, so I can let you in. Would you like to see it?”

  A gold chain. My transaction scribe’s chain was gold, marking me as authorised to use magic. And now, authorised to enter the secret scribes’ room.

  Torlion led me through the shop to a nondescript wooden door near the back. I’d always assumed it was just a store room, perhaps filled with mops and buckets and broken chairs waiting to be mended. Instead, it was full of spell books.

  It wasn’t a large room, not much bigger than a broom cupboard, but I gazed round in awe at shelf upon shelf of books, marked with the various symbols of prohibited topics: not just the harmful spells but volume after volume on advanced variances and complex multi-level directives, conditionals and dependencies. Fifth year work at least. One or two I recognised as being illegal to use altogether, even for mages. And histories – far more histories of magic than even I could read.

  I couldn’t afford to buy many books, but Master Tolmion was understanding. He let me buy a single book, then a few suns later, when I had exhausted its possibilities, he would buy it back from me at almost the same price. And he put a tiny table and wobbly chair in the room, and let me stay and read for as long as I liked.

  “One sun you will be a law scribe,” he said airily, when I thanked him. “Then you will be able to buy many books from me.”

  After that, I spent innumerable happy hours browsing through ancient musty tomes, filled with arcane spells I had never encountered before, or describing practices from long ago. I learned that there was once a higher rank than thought mage, something called a creation mage, who could invent new spells, but there hadn’t been one for centuries. There were other, lesser, mages who had more directed abilities so there were iron mages, tree mages, fire mages, wind mages, fruit mages, plough mages and even mushroom mages. I learned that all spells, not just the few marked as ineffective, had become less reliable over time, but no one knew why.

  ~~~~~

  I tried to find out something about Cal’s renewal ceremony, which I would have to participate in, but it was so secret that very little was known about it. Except by the mages, of course, and they weren’t telling. There were rumours though, and rather unsettling ones at that. Mages could be taken by violent rages during the ritual and injure anyone nearby, or themselves. They were so filled with magical energy that they simply burned up, or destroyed the building around them.

  And then there was the sex. Carnal pleasures, as the books had it. Unnatural, some said. Excessive lust, said another. Like beasts in the forest.

  I wasn’t sure what to make of it, but when the first snows came, the mages began their cycle of renewals. One by one they returned with spouse or drusse undamaged and seemingly untainted by unnatural practices, so I stopped worrying about it.

  My life was perfect that year, and only one ugly incident marred it. One evening I had gone to bed at the usual time, but the moon was still giving enough light to read by, so I was curled in the window seat with a boo
k. It was an unusually detailed history of scribing that I’d found in a book shop. I was engrossed in my reading when I became aware of raised voices. The noise came from the corridor outside my room, but some distance away. Clearly it didn’t concern me, so I returned to my book. It was difficult to concentrate, though, for the argument drifted nearer. Was that Cal’s voice? And Raylan, perhaps. Well, they often squabbled, so again it was nothing to do with me.

  I picked up my book, but dropped it almost at once. Now the voices were right outside my door, shouting, filled with venomous accusations and foul language.

  Then the door crashed open, and Cal marched in.

  “Cal, you just can’t—” Raylan said, his tall outline framed in the doorway.