Three Acts of Penance [01] Attrition: The First Act of Penance

by S. G. Night

  But he couldn’t find the words. The ice held his tongue. He could not break it.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Magic

  The silence did not break until Oron entered the kitchen. The three of them ate breakfast together at the table. Nelle gradually returned to her normal self as the silence thawed; by the time the food was gone, she was wearing her usual sunny smile on her lips again. But Racath could still detect a hint of her prior distress behind her eyes, like a sliver of broken ice.

  Once the mess was cleared away, Racath and Oron sat across from each other in their usual seats. Nelle announced that she was going to get dressed — she sounded better than she had before, but there was still a latent strain clinging to the back of her words. She retreated back to her room. After a moment, they heard her door open and shut behind her.

  As if he already knew the question Racath was about to ask, Oron addressed him, placating. “Don’t worry about her. She’s a tough girl. She’ll be alright.”

  Racath looked at the older Majiski. “So you noticed it, too?”

  Oron nodded once.

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  “There’s a lot riding on her shoulders,” Oron said with a forlorn smile. “Her burden is the heaviest of all of us by far. Even heavier than yours.”

  Racath’s mood soured instantly at the mention of the whole Krilati thing. “Yeah? How’s that?” The words came out bitter.

  “Well, Racath,” Oron said, leaning back in his chair. “You have the fate of Io riding on your shoulders, and that’s not trivial. But imagine being her. You — and by extension, that same burden you carry — are her responsibility. A responsibility given to her directly from God Himself. It’s her yoke to guide you, to make sure you succeed. She’s carrying the weight of your fate, and — through you — the fate of Io as well.”

  Racath frowned. “She seemed fine last night…”

  “It’s been hard for her lately,” Oron explained. “She’s got a lot on her mind, what with you finally arriving. There are some other things too, things she doesn’t like to talk about. You remind her...” Oron trailed off, then shrugged. “Well…those aren’t my stories to tell. Like I said, she’s tough. But she’s not unbreakable. Or unshakeable. She’s just as susceptible to fear as the rest of us. She can cover it most of the time, but sometimes it breaks through, like just now.”

  “Fear?” Racath repeated, taken aback. “What’s she got to be afraid of?”

  “Failure.” The word was like a millstone falling. “Can you even fathom the pressure she’s under? If she fails, she’ll have failed God Himself. She’ll have failed to help you save Io. She’ll have failed to preserve the Jedan religion — and even if it somehow survived, she would be the first failed augur in history. She’ll have failed her country, her faith, her race, her friends, her God, herself…and you.

  “Nelle believes in you. She trusts her visions. She knows that you can succeed, given the chance. But she has no faith in herself. She fears that she won’t be enough in the end.”

  Racath stared down at his hands. The more Oron talked, the heavier the load on his shoulders seemed to get. He hadn’t even decided if he could accept the Dragon Amongst Wolves idea at all, and now it felt like Oron was adding the weight of Nelle’s happiness to the pile.

  “I see….That seems like a decent reason to be worried.”

  “Maybe,” Oron conceded. “But she thinks too little of herself. She is enough. But, despite how long she’s been alive, she’s still young. Her heart and mind are young as her body, really, and so she has yet to let go of some of her adolescent insecurities and self-doubt…Nelle is still naïve in some ways. Still just a young girl.”

  “You really care about her,” Racath said absentmindedly.

  “She’s like a daughter to me,” Oron affirmed, nodding. “She was like a sister at first, but every day I got older and she stayed twenty, so….”

  Racath made an understanding gesture.

  “I have faith in her,” Oron said. “Young or not, naïve or not, God made the right choice in his augur. Nelle is strong, passionate. And she won’t stop fighting until the last drop of blood leaves her body. I just wish I could help her believe that of herself.”

  “Hmm.” All Racath wanted was for the subject to change, so he could push back his anxiety about all this again.

  Oron frowned at him for a moment, disapprovingly. “Right, then,” he said briskly. He straightened in his chair, collecting himself. “That’s enough conversation for now, I think. On to the lesson.”

  He gestured to the tabletop where he had earlier arranged an assortment of objects. There was a candlestick, a lead weight, a bottle of dark cranberry juice, a pitcher of water, and two transparent glasses — one tall, the other short.

  “This,” Oron began. “Is probably the most important lesson you’ll learn here, in terms of applicability. It’s a lesson you should have been taught as a child. But alas…” he shrugged. “Mrak.”

  Racath felt himself sit up a little. The thirst for information was burning in his throat again, although it was a little soured by resentment this time around. “I’m listening.”

  “Magic,” Oron announced simply. “To start, a question — what is magic?”

  Racath opened his mouth to answer, then suddenly realized that he didn’t have the slightest idea as to the answer. He couldn’t ever recall a time where he’d been taught the principles of magic. “Um…” he thought aloud. “Magic is…power?”

  Oron’s patient smile only made Racath feel more belittled. “Magic,” he said. “Or galdury, if you want to be technical, is the natural absorption, storage, manipulation, and projection of protean energies.”

  There was a pause. Racath made an expectant face. “And that means…?”

  “Allow me to elaborate,” Oron said magnanimously. “Of the six races, three of them are what we call galdur-born, meaning that they can wield magic.”

  “Majiski, Elves, and Demons,” Racath guessed. “I remember from yesterday.”

  “Indeed,” Oron affirmed. “Now, magic works differently for each galdur-born race. For Demons, the process is still mostly unknown to the likes of us. Magic for Elves and Majiski, on the other hand, was researched profusely by the High Scholars in the Third Age.

  “From what they learned — and they learned a great deal — Elves and Majiski share a particular anatomical component that the non-galdur-born races lack.”

  He tapped his temple with a finger. “It’s a piece of the brain, a structure that the Scholars called the anda. The anda has limited access to a plane of existence beyond our understanding — presumably, the plane from which Gospodar and Talk’ra originate — that we call Alltheim. Alltheim is brimming with an infinite amount of raw power, and that power bleeds into our plane through our anda.

  “This raw energy, protean energy, is beyond our ability to use or interact with. It is power in its most basic form. Pure potential magic. After our anda absorbs it, the protean energy is stored in a network of cells that line our nervous system. Those cells are called breyt’a, and. When a galdurist wills it — in the same way you would will your fingers to move, or your feet to walk — they manipulate the protean energy into any mundane form of energy, channel it, and project it out of the body. Projection is done in one of two ways.”

  He held up his bare forearm, showing Racath the crosshatch of beveled, grey-blue lines on his skin. “Majiski have the markara. The markara is a tissue made up of a high concentration of breyt’a cells. The higher the concentration, the darker the markara’s coloring, and the more magic can be projected at once. This grants us a natural aptitude with Magicks that are focused and concentrated. War-magic.”

  Racath looked down at his own markara. The coils were a deep, dark black. “And Elves?”

  “Elves have a layer of breyt’a beneath every inch of their skin called the crain,” Oron answered. “It’s much thinner than a markara, so they can’t concentrate energy like we ca
n. But they can project lower concentrations over a much broader area. This gives them a natural ability with High-Magicks — Magicks that affect matter and the world. You getting all this?”

  Racath grit his teeth at the interruption. “If I have a question, I’ll ask it,” he said coldly. “You don’t have to keep stopping on my account.”

  Oron frowned at him for a moment, then shrugged. “Very well, then.” He continued speaking, faster this time, like he was daring Racath to keep up with him. “Both races have something called a getu. The getu isn’t an organ so much as it is a concept: it’s the total capacity of protean energy that a galdurist’s body can store.”

  “How is that measured?” Racath asked. “Is it the same as mundane energy? In heft?”

  The older Majiski raised his eyebrows. “You’re familiar with mundane physics?”

  Racath bobbed his head once. “Alexis taught me a lot of it. Kinematics, force, energy and power, oscillation and springs.”

  “Hmm,” Oron said. “That knowledge will come in handy. A lot of the equations and principles are worked into the mathematic portion of galdury, which we will go over in detail at a later date. In answer to your question, no, the measurement is not the same. One unit of protean energy is called a grain, which is equal to a little more than three heft of mundane energy.”

  As he said this, he opened the bottle of cranberry juice, and filled the tall glass to the brim. Then he filled the shorter glass with water from the pitcher.

  “Here’s a demonstration for you,” Oron said. “It varies from person to person, but — for a Majiski — the general rule of thumb is that you have about three times the amount of arcane energy stored in your getu as you do mundane energy in your body.

  “So this glass,” he gestured to the glass of juice. “Is your getu, and the juice is the energy it holds. The other,” he pointed at the water glass. “Is your body, and the water is the mundane energy therein — about one-third as much energy as your getu.”

  Racath pursed his lips, listening intently as Oron continued.

  “So when you use some amount of magic, you expend some of the energy in your getu.” Oron took a small swig from the glass of juice, draining about a quarter of it. “And afterward, your anda starts slowly drawing energy from the world, replenishing your getu at a rate of about one grain per second.” He carefully tipped the bottle over the glass again, allowing more juice to trickle into the glass.

  “Alright…” Racath murmured thoughtfully. “So where does the water come in?”

  Oron picked the glass back up, and threw back the entire contents a single swallow. “Say you perform some massive, demanding feat of magic, you completely drain your getu, and then continue to project more magic. Your breyt’a, drained of protean energy, will resort to pulling energy straight from your body to sustain your efforts.”

  “Like if you’re starving,” Racath assumed. “How your body starts to feed on itself to stay alive.”

  “That’s a good analogy, actually,” Oron said. “You’re out of juice, if you’ll pardon the pun, so you start draining water.” The older Majiski lifted the glass of water to his lips and began to drink.

  “And what happens when the water’s gone?” Racath asked as Oron gulped down the liquid.

  After a moment, Oron set the empty glass back down on the table, but he did not release it. His fingers flexed, squeezed. The glass shattered in his hand, shards scattering across the table like fragments of broken ice. Blood welled from shallow scratches in Oron’s palm, but his expression was blank, painless.

  “You die.”

  “Ah ha…” Racath said quietly, eyeing the carpet of broken glass. “Good to know.”

  “Indeed. So, there are many different forms magic can take. There are dozens of subcategories and obscure labels, but basically there are nine types of magical energy that protean power can be made into. I have some more demonstrations prepared, just keep one thing in mind, please?”

  Racath lifted his eyebrows. “What?”

  “Much of what I’m about to show you are considered High-Magicks,” Oron said. “They are not easy for a Majiski to perform, and in the old Commonwealth when the law was built around balance between the races, they would have been illegal for our kind to use. Things are different now, of course — desperate times, desperate measures. But I have been practicing these Magicks for decades, so I may make them appear simple. They are not. I guarantee that you will fail every one of them more than once when we start your practical training.”

  Racath bristled at the implication. He prided himself on never making the same mistake twice. He wanted to say something of that effect to Oron, but the older Majiski appeared to have already moved on.

  Oron adjusted his posture and waved his hand at the lead block on the table. The weight quivered, then rose off the wooden surface, like it was being hoisted by invisible string.

  “The nine forms of magical energy,” he began. “One: telekinetic galdury — mind-driven mechanical force — which can be as simple as lifting a lead block….” He moved his hand over the field of broken glass. The air rippled, and the glass shards shivered and, all at once, flew back together. The once-broken glass sat whole and spotless on the table. “Or as difficult and complex as reorganizing material substance.”

  Racath’s eyes went wide. A thousand possibilities flooded into his head as the glass, perfectly remade, glittered charmingly back at him.

  “Two: biochemical galdury,” Oron continued with his list. “Which you yourself used yesterday in the pit. When etheria enters a Majiski’s bloodstream, it prompts a certain amount of your breyt’a to convert their protean storage into mundane physical power, multiplying your strength. On a more complicated level, a highly skilled galdurist can use it to manipulate biology….” He fixated his eyes on the cuts on his hand. His skin writhed, flexed, and smoothed over. No scab or scar to speak of.

  “Healing?” Racath asked.

  Oron nodded. “Yes. But don’t be fooled — it takes a tremendous amount of energy to accelerate a body’s repair processes, so it’s only really useful for small wounds. Don’t think you can count on magic to save you from a sword to the chest.”

  He wiped the blood from his palm, then held his fingers upward like hooked claws. His markara flexed and a flicker of blue lightning jumped from his hand. Arcs of static danced between his fingers.

  “Three: electric galdury. The manipulation and movement of small particles. With little effort, a galdurist can make a pretty lightshow in their hands, or jokingly shock a friend in the back. And with the application of great skill, a galdurist can call down a lightning bolt from the sky — or even project one from their markara.”

  Suddenly, the lightning vanished, and was replaced by an orb of pale, vivid light. It cast a halo of illumination around the entire kitchen, bathing everything with a bluish hue.

  “Fourth: telephotonic galdury. The ability to project and manipulate light, both as a particle—” he turned his hand so that it faced outward, and the ball of light shifted, compressing into a narrow beam. “And as a wave.”

  Where the ray of fine light touched the tabletop, it reflected such an intense glare that Racath’s eyes burned when he looked directly at it. The miniscule dot of polished wood began to hiss and bubble. Foul-smelling smoke rose from the spot like burning leather. When Oron stopped the flow of magic and the light vanished, a ghostly blob was left on Racath’s vision.

  “Fifth, the counterpart of light: dark galdury, or shadow magic.” Oron held up no hand or object in demonstration this time. “In its simplest applications it is merely the negation of light.”

  Oron wore an expression that Racath couldn’t quite read. “But once you start bringing dark energies into the mix, things get sticky. More complicated. Things like dark-fire and shadow-stepping. Dark galdury is damn useful to be sure — but it’s tricky, potent, and more than a little corruptive. I’ll show you some later on, but not in here. It should be used sparingl
y. Understood?”

  Racath rolled his shoulders in a shrug. “Sure.”

  “Sixth: telethermal galdury,” Oron said, pointing to the candle. “If you please, Master Thanjel, tell me how I might light this candle with magic?”

  It sounded like a trick question. Racath thought about it for a moment, and then said: “You could heat the wick until it ignites.”

  “That is, indeed, one method.” The older Majiski reached out toward the candle, palm out. The space between his hand and the candle wick wavered and writhed like the air above hot cobbles. Racath felt a narrow shaft of warmth brush his skin from the direction of Oron’s markara. The flame smoked and guttered for a moment, the wax around the edge melting slightly. Then the wick ignited into a tall, slender flame. The fire danced and winked lithely at Racath, greeting him — it reminded him of the way Nelle laughed.

  Oron snuffed the candle out, leaving to empty and smoking. Its absence was sudden, stark, and left Racath surprisingly and profoundly irritated, like someone had just taken away his new favorite toy.

  “Telethermal galdury comes in two forms,” Oron said without another thought. “One is the simple manipulation of heat and temperature. However, there is another way to—”

  Racath wanted the fire back. He flicked his wrist at the candle, casual as brushing off a mosquito. His own markara moved. A breath of flickering red fire shot out from his hand. It impacted the candle and dispersed around it in a flare and a whoosh of air. It vanished as quickly as it had appeared, but not before the wick caught fire.

  “Like that?” Racath asked dryly.

  Oron blinked in surprise. “Quite…” he said, clearing his throat. “Now, what you just did there is—”