by Ben Rovik
“No!” Tymon literally jabbed his finger into Lundin’s face, and the technician squeaked in pain. Who does that? Lundin thought, leaning back and rubbing the red tip of his nose. “The constants chain us down! To be expected to remember and return to them in the height of magical exhilaration is ridiculous. Anti-magical. Unless the spirits specifically call for them, I, for one, omit them in my casting.”
“And how often do your spells fail?”
As expected, the room got deathly quiet and Tymon’s eyes narrowed so hard he probably gave himself a migrane. Lundin was sure he could have put the question more delicately, but his nose hurt so he didn’t feel like it. He looked at the old wizard with an upturned face and waited for the man to get over himself and answer, one way or the other.
“Spells never fail,” Tymon finally said. “But… sometimes spells succeed in different ways.”
“Ha!” Sir Kelley barked, utterly shameless. His grandfather ignored him. Lundin cleared his throat.
“What does that mean, Mr. Tymon?”
“Say you cast a love spell. You invoke the spirits, you name the woman or man to be acted upon, you describe the petitioner who longs for their love, you follow the calls of the spirits for six, eight, ten hours. At the end, maybe the subject falls in love with the petitioner. Maybe the subject falls in love with the petitioner’s brother, or someone who resembles him. Maybe the subject is overcome with self-love and retreats to a private room. Maybe a thousand other quiet things happen between two people and you never know what is magic and what is passion and what is destiny.”
Tymon looked sidelong at Lundin. “All these things belong to the Mobinoji,” he said. “A wizard appeals to the spirits with his whole heart when he casts a spell, and however they choose to respond, he accepts it. Success? Failure? These are Petronaut words, and they have no place here. A wizard honors the spirits the same—the same—no matter the result.”
The wizard was sincerely trying to explain now, and Lundin appreciated it; but it was beyond the technician’s power to avoid saying the question that was rising up from his gut like a ripe belch.
“Why?”
Archimedia raised a hand a few seconds later, and Tymon stopped swearing. The old wizard stomped off behind a curtain of feathers and beads and was gone from view. His wife set her wool-work down and folded her smooth hands in her lap. “Why what, exactly?” she asked.
“Why would you be just as happy with failure?” Lundin whispered.
“Who are we to decide what failure is?”
“Failure is when a blacksmith hires you to make the milkmaid fall for him, and apart from a naughty dream about anvils she has in the hayloft, nothing happens to her,” he said. “Ask any blacksmith; that’s failure.”
“Help me understand, Petronaut. What would you have us do?” Archimedia asked, her white hair catching the light. Lundin leaned in closer to her, desperate to make his case while her encouraging attitude lasted.
“Don’t settle so easily,” he said. “I know magic works. I saw it do something horrible, with my own eyes. And I saw how a good wizard felt when his magic hadn’t been strong enough to stop it.” The look on Jellmap’s face as LaMontina’s body was carried out of the tent had been unbearable. There was a man who knew perfectly well what failure was. “If it works, there’s got to be a mechanism for how it works. And that means there’s a mechanism for how it fails, too. That’s just how the world is! Do you see? There’s got to be a difference—a measurable, substantive difference— between a spell that completes and a spell that fizzles.”
“The only difference is the pleasure of the spirits.”
“Okay; so how do you cast spells that please them more?”
“One never knows.”
“Then one isn’t asking!” Lundin slammed a palm down on the table impulsively, and the jar of of eyeballs tipped over and started rolling towards him. His vision went black and somebody gave a little shriek.
Archimedia waited patiently, and Kelley not so patiently, until Lundin had taken enough deep breaths to be able to continue. “Thousands of wizards cast spells every day across the six continents, right? If we can figure out what’s constant between the spells that work, and the ones that don’t, we can start spreading the word! Improving the process. Increasing the success rate. We can understand magic, not just practice it. And wizards, their customers, and all the rest of us will benefit.”
“You like the idea of constants, don’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Lundin admitted. “That’s my world. But if, like you said, there are certain words that have to be said in order for an invocation to work; then, for all the chaos and all the variables magic’s got, I think it might be your world too.”
Archimedia stood, slowly. She was a small woman, and thin, like an upside-down broom with white straw for hair. Her fingers played across a woven charm on the wall. “Mr. Lundin,” she whispered, her eyes looking at something far away. “If you can, in fact, understand magic… improve the process… increase the success rate… what, exactly, makes you think we will all benefit?”
Lundin and Sir Kelley looked at each other. “I… I don’t understand, ma’am. How could we not?”
There was a long, heavy stillness. They watched as her too-young hands wrung against each other nervously. “How, indeed?” she murmured finally, her milky eyes unfocused.
With a visible effort, she brought herself back to reality. Archimedia clapped her hands once. “I have something I must show you,” she said, reaching for a dusty book on the crowded shelves.
Chapter Four
The Wizard’s Path
Jilmaq was a mess. The wizard was curled up on the floor, whimpering, at the foot of his moldy cot in the moldy back room of his moldy, mushroom-shaped hut outside the city walls. His leathery face was streaked with tears, and his long black braid so caked with dirt and debris it would take a rake, not a comb, to straighten its tangles. A jug of pungent, nameless hooch was tipped over on his square bedside table. The alcoholic puddle it was creating on the dirt floor was probably the cleanest spot in the entire house.
The wizard was distraught, sniveling, one arm looped around the leg of his bed for stability. But he was also listening.
“Do you think they blame you for LaMontina’s death?”
“I know it,” Jilmaq said shakily, not looking at the figure standing over him. An expectant silence hung in the air. Jilmaq clenched his fist around the wooden leg, growing angry. “What more would you have me say?” he growled. “They blame me. I failed. Does it please you to hear it?”
“Does it please you to say it?” the other asked, softly.
The wizard shook his head, his brain thumping with drink and resentment. “The nobles, the Regency Council, the hoi polloi— they do not understand the fickleness of the Mobinoji. They know not the lengths to which I pushed my body and my mind that day. They know nothing of magic. All they know is that a bright young man was killed, and I did not save him.”
“And so you are punished,” the visitor said. “For matters beyond your control, you pay the price.”
“Justice,” Jilmaq said bitterly. “They left me a roof over my head, at least; my life.”
“This is not your life, Jilmaq.” The wizard raised his eyes at last. He took a look around his grimy two-room hovel and his stomach lurched with disgust. His visitor went on, in a sinewy whisper, “You deserve more than this. To be relegated to eking out a hardscrabble life as witch doctor to the unwashed, outside the city? You served the nobles of Delia for three dozen years. It was your magic that let the barren LaMontina woman bear children again.”
“And it was my magic that let her nephew die, victim of a peasant witch.”
“Suffer, then,” the other said with sudden harshness. “Wallow. Drink. Gore yourself on the scapegoat’s horns they gave you and bleed your life out in this stinking pit.”
Jilmaq was weeping openly. His visitor watched him for a lingering moment, then shifted weight onto the other s
hiny black boot.
“Or,” the visitor said, lifting the word like a treat for a hound, a scrap of delicious fat just out of reach.
Jilmaq looked up, his sobs subsiding. “Or?” His voice shuddered.
“Redeem yourself, in the eyes of men and spirits alike, by doing something truly exceptional.”
The dirty wizard wiped his nose. “What?” he asked, hardly daring to believe his ears. “For whom?”
“For those who remember their friends.”
There was a muffled clink on the earthen floor, and Jilmaq’s eyes widened. A cluster of two-toned coins in gold and platinum lay at his feet; more money than a hundred peasants could have paid. He couldn’t keep himself from scraping the coins up into his lap then and there, dirt embedding itself into his fingernails.
The other slowly lowered into a crouch, approaching Jilmaq’s eye level. The wizard froze, staring into that face. The visitor reached a pair of gloved hands deep into a black robe. The hands emerged a moment later. “As for the task itself, it’s really very simple,” that smooth voice said.
Jilmaq’s bloodshot eyes went wide. Bound with ribbon at both ends, draped across the visitor’s upturned hands, was a shining braid of fawn-colored hair.
“For the last time, it’s fascinating. Now will you shut up and lift?”
“I feel like an explorer,” Lundin grunted joyously, shifting his sweaty hands for purchase along the smooth corners of the apparatus and heaving upwards. He was bent double with his knees locked and felt the agonizing pull as all the effort of the lift went directly to his lower back. Samanthi staggered for balance on the other side, trying to even out her grip against Lundin’s over-zealous hoist. “It’s just that magic has literally never had this kind of analysis before,” Lundin panted, shambling forwards with the bulky machine resting partly on his thighs.
“I’m sure that’s true,” Samanthi said through clenched teeth, glancing over her shoulder as she walked backwards, the cords in her arms taut from exertion.
“And it’s not chaos; not even close. There’s a formula. Like I told you, the Invocation starts—”
“Horace, watch your burning feet!” Samanthi swore as the bulky generator wobbled towards her. Lundin recovered from his stumble, kicking the pair of calipers aside. The floor of the Petronaut warehouse was a minefield of discarded paperwork and loose widgets, as if the criss-crossing crush of busy, preoccupied techs and ‘nauts charging this way and that to prepare their gear wasn’t obstacle enough.
The city-state of Delia had eight squads of resident Petronauts; about ten dozen curious souls in total. The happy quartet of Malcolm, Mascarpone, Elena and Lundin was the smallest squad by far. Delia was a wonderful place to be a Petronaut, as the world went. While Delian nobles could hire the master machinesmiths for contracted work, the meddling patronage that allowed wealthy dilettantes to dictate what they should research was forbidden by a royal decree two decades old. Old Queen Tess had been a powerful advocate for the ‘nauts, arguing very convincingly to King Randolph that Delia was more likely to gain a technological edge over its neighbors by giving its researchers facilities, funding, and freedom, than by forcing them to kowtow to wealthy patrons for every coin, and waste time humoring their benefactors’ half-cocked ideas for this invention or that whirligig. Twenty-one years later, Delia’s influence stretched far beyond its city walls to every corner of the Anthic Thrust, the long thin peninsula the city called home. The success was thanks largely to the string of marvels that had emerged from Workshop Row, where ideas flowed freely between ‘nauts and private naturalists, merchants, dreamers and tinkerers. When the widowed Queen herself passed three years ago, the thought of a more heavy-handed state gave the ‘nauts many sleepless nights. But the Regency Council, established to rule until Princess Naomi came of age, stayed faithful to Old Tess’s promises, and researchers stayed at nearly the same levels of funding and independence.
Which meant, on the few occasions when the Regents did make an official request for their services, the Petronaut community fell all over itself to be obliging. Currently, the Council was tapping all of them to help provide security, logistical support, or (in the case of the Parade squad) entertainment for the royal feastday in two weeks. The Princess would go through the First Ordeals only once, after all, and marking this important step on her road to adulthood with anything less than the full resources of the state was out of the question. So tomorrow, the Council’s liaisons to the Petronauts, the earnest Baron and Baroness Quinish, would begin personal inspections of every piece of equipment to be employed for the feastday—a task made both easier and harder by the fact that neither of them had a clue what they were looking at. The best tactic to take with the Honorable Quinishes, the Petronauts had found, was to make any broken or unreliable equipment as shiny as possible, so it received an automatic stamp of approval, and to make any important, sensitive equipment look dingy and grimy to deter clumsy white-gloved hands. (Just because Petronauts spent more time with machines didn’t mean they couldn’t handle people, too.)
Lundin shifted the weight, his hands throbbing as they continued their crabwalk across the warehouse. “What was I saying?” he asked.
“Nothing. I was enjoying it,” Samanthi said.
“Oh—right! So! So the Invocation is the first part of any spell. Real consistent. There’s this text, the pingdu calabra, that they always say. A few pages of text, tops. And it connects them to the spirit world.”
“How exciting for them.”
“Part two—now this is a much longer one—is called the Illustration, and it’s what you want the spell to do. It’s where you say, you know, ‘this is a spell that makes a person fall in love,’ or—well, ‘this is a spell that makes a person burst into flames.’”
“By the living spheres, are you insane?” Samanthi hissed, glaring at him. “Don’t go throwing words like that around, magic man! There are drums of petrolatum everywhere in this place!”
“Don’t worry,” Lundin said, his face red from the strain. He really couldn’t feel his fingers anymore underneath the generator. “No danger in talking about this stuff. We aren’t speaking in Mabinanto—and, anyway, speaking one part of a spell without the other parts in the right order is a recipe for instant fizzle.”
They finally reached the wagon and, with a heave and a grunt, set the generator down in its place. Once inspected, it would be palace-bound, like the rest of their gear. Their little Reconnaissance squad had been assigned to assist the Palace Guard, making sure nothing unexpected came in or out of the royal wing while the Princess was undergoing the First Ordeals. A plum assignment if there ever was one. They’d be among the first Delians (outside of palace regulars, of course) to see the Princess in her newly grown-up state, with her hair cut back and dressed like a midling, not a girl. It would be strange to see her without the long, fawn-colored hair that shone through all her childhood portraits.
Lundin and Samanthi caught their breath, leaning against the wagon bed. He looked at her as she watched other teams’ gear go by with an appraising eye. “Have you heard of Mabinanto before, then?” Lundin asked.
“If it’s not a type of alcohol I’m not interested,” Samanthi said, absently.
Lundin smiled and raised his hands in a gracious gesture. “You know, we could talk about this later, if you want,” he said. He prided himself on his ability to read signals from other people.
“No, you know what? Let’s hear it all at once.” Samanthi drummed a little rat-a-tat on the wagon with her callused hands. “If little Princess Naomi can take two weeks of Ordeals, I can listen to you blab about magic another few minutes. Please tell me, Horace, what Mabinanto is.”
“It’s really okay, Sam. I don’t want to bore you.”
“For fire’s sake—! Just bore me already!”
“Mabinanto, then! Language of wizards. It’s, uh—it’s kind of like Old Harutian; big compound words; straightforward grammar, thankfully.”
“I didn’t
think anything about magic was straightforward.” Samanthi tilted her head towards him, leaning back against the wagon.
Lundin started talking with his hands more, the way he did whenever his energy levels started to build up. Samanthi stifled a snort, grinning to herself as he responded. “That’s what I’m saying, though! I feel like everything we all think about magic—wizards included—is wrong. Because when I looked through Archimedia’s… uh, Kelley’s step-grandmother… when I looked through her books, at the lines and lines of Mabinanto that supposedly make up a successful Illustration, you know what it looked like to me?” He leaned in closer. “Code.”
Samanthi frowned, scratching her jawline with a fingernail. “‘Code.’ You mean, like our ‘code?’ Abby’s ‘code’? How is that possible?”
“I’ve gotta show you the book.”
“We’ve gotta retool the fuel lines in Kelley’s suit, is what we gotta do,” she said automatically, but for once she didn’t feel like leaping back into the workshop right away.
“Say a wizard is doing the Illustration for a spell that—that makes hair fall out. You’ve got to see this language. It’s full of conditionals, it’s full of loops… ‘If the hair is coarse, respond this way; if the subject already has hair loss, discontinue at such and such point; hair on this body part should be treated this way, repeat until X occurs; and if the subject is being magically protected, go to ritualistic phrase 18…’:
“I don’t flaming believe this,” Samanthi said, guarded and marveling at the same time.
“Maybe I’m crazy. Maybe I’m just…” Lundin took a moment to sort out his words. “Maybe, because I’m a tech, I only know how to see things in terms of what I know. I’m sure there’s nuance I’m missing, no doubt of it. But as I read the stuff, all I could think was, ‘this looks familiar.’”
A passing Bulwark ‘naut, her visor down and her suit’s heavy boots thunderous against the floor, looked down at them as she stomped by. They were the only people standing still in the whole warehouse. Samanthi crossed her arms. “What happens next?” she demanded fiercely.
