Disciple of War (Art of the Adept Book 4)

by Michael G. Manning

  Then he squeezed, closing his fist and clamping down on her source at the same time. At the same time, he saw the discomfort reflected in her features. Selene’s smile vanished. “It feels tight,” she remarked.

  He nodded, adjusting the source-cage to fit around the changes he had made. Then he released the link and exhaled. “Look at your ring.”

  “The glow is dimmer.”

  “I’ve reduced the amount of turyn your body can hold. Basically, everything your source produces is trapped within the source-cage. You have to learn two things. One, you have to restrict your source so that you only produce an amount of turyn that keeps that smaller space filled, and two, you have to learn to survive on that greatly reduced amount of turyn.”

  Selene nodded. “It doesn’t seem too bad, so far. It just feels weird.”

  “Clamping down on your source is the hard part, and that’s what you have to do first. Learning to live on half the turyn is the slow, miserable part that takes a month or so,” he explained.

  “I can do this,” she declared.

  “No matter what, don’t cast any spells. If you allow yourself to release turyn that way, you won’t learn. You have to push yourself to the limit. It’s going to feel like you’re dying.” He went back to the desk and sat down, then opened a book.

  “What are you doing now?”

  He glanced up. “I’m going to read this book you recommended on ward theory.”

  “That’s it?”

  Will shrugged. “It will take a little while for your problems to start, and after that neither of us will get any peace. It also didn’t seem fair for me to practice spells in front of you, since you can’t do the same, so I figured I’d read until you start panicking.”

  Selene gave him a lopsided grin. “Panicking? I don’t panic.”

  “Sure,” said Will, then returned his eyes to the page.

  Her hands came down on the edge of the desk as she leaned closer. “No, really. I don’t panic. Have you ever seen me panic? I’m always calm.”

  You were a little out of control when your father tried to make you kill me, thought Will, but he didn’t think that was a fair comment. “I believe you,” he replied instead.

  She frowned. “You don’t sound like it.”

  “I do, honestly,” he responded, but her disbelief in his belief already had him fighting to keep the smirk out of his voice, which undermined his statement.

  “You’ll see.”

  “I wasn’t arguing with you,” he told her. “I’m on your side.”

  She growled and left. Will struggled to focus on the rather boring subject of wards, which he found rather dry and uninspired. Most of the text dealt with decay times and the methods for calculating how long a given ward could be expected to last, which apparently was a function of design, complexity, and the initial turyn investment. Thirty minutes later and he was into the first simple examples, which showed how to calculate the expected survival time, when Selene returned.

  “My skin feels funny,” she announced.

  He nodded.

  “Is it supposed to feel like that?”

  “It gets worse.”

  “What do I do about it?”

  “Find a way to stop producing so much turyn.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Smartass.” She left again.

  Will returned to his reading, fighting against incipient drowsiness even though he hadn’t been up very long. I should read this at night before bed, he noted wryly. An hour went by, and he began hearing odd noises outside the study. Rising from his seat, he went and looked out the door, where he saw that Selene was vigorously cleaning the banister on the stairs.

  She was wearing one of her plain dresses and had tied her hair back, so it was apparent that she meant business as she worked her way industriously from the bottom to the top, polishing every part of the wood. Will could see that she was working up a sweat.

  He returned to the book and tried not to think about how she must be feeling, but he couldn’t focus. Activating the limnthal, he announced, “She’s to the point where she’s trying to exhaust herself.”

  “So the fun is just beginning,” said Arrogan.

  “Should I go ahead and paralyze her?”

  “Wait until she starts to panic or act irrational. Doing so now will just make her extra angry.”

  That seemed reasonable. “Well, one thing I won’t do is ignore her,” said Will. “That’s what you did with me and it was terrifying. I thought you were just waiting for me to die.”

  “So wise for one so young,” said Arrogan sarcastically. “What do you intend to do instead?”

  “I’ll stay with her and talk to her in a soothing voice.”

  “I’m sure that would have worked well with you,” said the ring.

  “It’s better than leaving me lying there like a piece of wood while you go about your business,” replied Will angrily.

  “Really? Let’s think this through. Imagine you’re back there again, burning up inside, panicking, and now you’re paralyzed and can’t do anything. Meanwhile, I’m sitting beside you, a compassionate look on my face, talking to you in a calm, soothing voice. ‘Don’t worry, Will. It will be better soon. Trust me, Will. The pain is just a gateway to a new life.’”

  Will grimaced. “All right, you’ve made your point. That sounds horrifyingly creepy.”

  “This is all for the best, Will. It won’t hurt forever,” continued Arrogan in a saccharine tone.

  Will shivered. “Enough. You’re going to give me nightmares.”

  Selene’s head popped around the edge of the door. “Has anyone cleaned the roof lately? I think I saw some dead leaves up there yesterday.”

  Their roof had a steep pitch and it was made of slate, which meant it rarely needed cleaning. When it did, Will usually just used a spell, rather than risk someone climbing up, which could damage the slates—or the climber. “I’ll take care of it,” he told her. “You don’t need to be climbing up there.”

  Her face was flushed and damp with sweat. “I don’t mind. I need to do something anyway. I can’t sit still.”

  “Pick something else.”

  “I’ll wash the floors.”

  “You mean mop the floors, right?”

  She shook her head. “No. I’ll get a rag and a bucket so I can go over them more thoroughly.”

  Will had gotten into the habit of using Selene’s Solution, the spell she had created, to clean various rooms every day, so he knew quite well how clean the floors were. “I don’t think that’s necessary. I just—”

  “They’re dirty!” she hissed, and then she disappeared.

  Will started to get up and follow her. “She’s lost her mind,” he muttered.

  “Don’t chase her,” advised Arrogan. “When she gets truly desperate, she’ll come back to you. I don’t think it will be much longer.”

  His prediction turned out to be spot on. Twenty minutes later, Will heard a crash and a bang. Running down the stairs, he found Selene in the entry hall. The pail had been turned over, or perhaps flung, since it was some ten feet away. Water was everywhere, and Selene’s face was red and flushed with tears of frustration when she looked up at him. “I can’t do it, Will. I’ve been trying. I know this isn’t helping, but nothing else is working either. I can’t control it.”

  He gave her a sad look. “This is just the start. You still have hours to go before you reach the end.”

  Her eyes widened. “I’m dying, Will. If it is going to take much longer, I won’t make it. I can’t!” She jumped to her feet, face frantic.

  Will caught her with a source-link and quickly paralyzed her, then he caught her in his arms as she started to fall. Lifting her carefully, he made his way up the stairs and took her to the bedroom where he laid her gently on the bed. The sight of her terrified eyes rolling back and forth as she silently pleaded with him almost undid him. He kept his gaze away from her face after that. For the first time, he understood why Arrogan had seemed so col
d and uncaring when Will had gone through the same thing.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t care enough to look at me; he couldn’t bear to see the fear in my eyes. He knew what I was going through, Will realized. Everything made more sense now that he was on the other side of the process. He walked to the other side of the room, where he couldn’t see her face, where she couldn’t see him, and took a seat.

  Selene might think he had left her, but he was only a few feet away. There was no question about reading at this point. He was sick with fear. With the source-link active, he could sense her terror, her pain, and her rage. It was an instinctive sort of anger. Every instinct was telling her that she was on the verge of death, and despite it all, he had paralyzed her and refused to free her so she could live. It was an awful experience, no matter which side of the student-teacher relationship you were on.

  Another hour passed, and he wondered how much more he could endure. It took me most of the night, so this could go on for hours and hours. He wanted to pull his hair out with frustration. Unable to stop himself, Will moved a little so he could see her face again. Tears were streaming from her eyes. The noise of his movement caused her to open them, and one eye fixed on him, burning with anger.

  He went back to his seat. “You have to imagine squeezing it. It’s sort of like making a fist. No, that’s not quite it either.” He thought about it for a moment. “The feeling is a little like when you have to poop, and you clench up at the end.” Shut up, Will, he told himself. She’s already pissed, no need to make her think you’re stupid too.

  Will chewed his lip nervously. If she dies, I’ll never forgive myself. He was staring at the floor, but then he saw a flash of turyn as a spell came together then expanded to fill the room. He recognized it immediately, Selene’s Solution. “No!” he yelped, standing up quickly. He released the source-link, and a few seconds later, Selene began to move. “Why? You can’t learn if you use magic!”

  “I was dying!” she shouted back. “How could you do that to me? Do you know how terrified I was?”

  “Yes! I’ve been through it. Damn it. This ruins everything!”

  “Well, forgive me for not dying!”

  Will sat back down and covered his face, trying to get control of himself. Yelling wouldn’t help matters. A second later, the door slammed, and when he looked up, she was gone.

  Chapter 4

  Things were distinctly frosty between Will and Selene the rest of the day. When he saw her again that evening, it was only at the dinner table. She declined to speak, aside from basic necessities, and afterward Will found an excuse to leave and do some nighttime spell practice. He didn’t return until after their usual bedtime, and rather than enter the bedroom he elected to use a couch in the downstairs parlor.

  It took him forever to fall asleep, but not long after he had, he woke with a start. Someone loomed over him in the darkness. Selene’s expression was a thoroughly undignified mixture of distress and sorrow.

  “Is it this bad?” she asked quietly.

  Rubbing his eyes, he sat up. “I didn’t want to make things worse.”

  “Come to bed.” She started for the stairs, and he quickly followed. Neither spoke as he undressed and climbed into his side of the giant four-poster, but just a few minutes after he lay down Selene’s hand snaked over to find his beneath the sheets.

  His heart unclenched, and they both slept peacefully from that point on. The next day, they tried again, and failed even sooner. They didn’t fight about it after that, but Selene seemed desperate and insisted on trying every day for the rest of the week. Though she didn’t vent her frustration on him, Will could tell she was close to a mental breakdown as each day’s failure weighed more heavily upon her.

  After the fourth day, he took a walk and used the privacy to talk to Arrogan. “I was afraid of this,” said the ring.

  “She just can’t do it,” said Will. “If anything, she’s doing worse each time.”

  “Now you understand why I put you through it before allowing you to learn how to use magic.”

  “You said others taught their apprentices spells first, but they somehow managed to get them through the first compression. How did they do it?” asked Will.

  “It’s a completely different technique, and it can take years just for the first compression. The second takes even longer, and as far as I know none of them ever made it to the third compression,” his mentor explained.

  “Why does it take so long?”

  “It’s the opposite of how you did it. Rather than force the shift in a single go, you train the student to absorb turyn and subsist without turyn from their source gradually. So, instead of using a source-cage, you link to them, forcibly compress their source for them, and then drain their turyn. The teacher keeps the apprentice in a state of relative turyn starvation for a period of hours each day, forcing their body to adapt. As you remember, it took you roughly a month to adapt after compressing your own source, but since this method is intermittent it can take the student several years, and then they still have to learn how to compress their own source independently. Without the stress and fear produced by the method you went through, that can take many more years.”

  “How many years are we discussing?” asked Will.

  “Seven or eight to complete the first compression, and probably more to get through the second. She could be forty before she reaches second-order.”

  Losing twenty years of time meant Selene would also age significantly during that period, while Will remained relatively young. And she would never make third-order, so her lifespan would at best be less than half of his own. Will groaned.

  Arrogan went on, “The plus side is that the method is perfectly safe, at least for the first compression. No one ever dies that way.”

  “How many died using the method I went through?”

  “In the early days, probably ten or twenty percent. But after they started using the candle spell to help apprentices to understand their inner turyn first, the death rate dropped to less than one or two in a hundred. The second compression was still relatively risky, at around ten percent dying, and very few attempted the third compression.”

  “Why? Just because of fear?”

  “Well, most wizards were first-order, and the second-order wizards were a small minority. It depended a lot on who your teacher was. If you were a first-order wizard, you were unlikely to push your student to surpass you by getting them to the second-order, and the same held true for second-order wizards. You were lucky to have me as your master, since only a third-order wizard would be likely to push you to attempt it.”

  In the past, Will might have taken that statement as a bit of arrogance on his teacher’s part, but it was simple truth now that he understood things better. “This isn’t just about Selene, Grandfather. It’s about the future of wizardry. If I’m going to find a way to break Terabinia of its addiction to sorcery, I’m going to have to be able to train a lot of new wizards. I can’t afford to waste all the wizards who’ve already been trained and taught. I need a way to help them as well. A way that doesn’t take twenty years.”

  Arrogan’s tone was harsh. “You should forget about the ones that already graduated from Wurthaven. They’re all bound by Lognion’s graduation seal. You couldn’t trust them. He could use it to turn them against you at any point. Or he could use the enchantment to force them to tell him the secrets of your training. As you well know, it can make them do anything.”

  Will vividly remembered the day that Lognion had ordered Selene to kill him. Resisting the command would have killed her if Count Spry hadn’t killed Will and thus invalidated the order. The strength of will required to resist the enchantment meant being willing to endure soul-rending pain and a horrific death. It was almost certainly worse than the pain, fear, and sheer panic that Will had endured to achieve his first compression.

  His eyes went wide. “That’s it!”

  “What?”

  “You said the problem is that once
a student learns to use magic it’s impossible to make them not use it to save themselves when they’re trying to compress their source. But there is a way to do it.”

  Arrogan sounded confused. “What are you babbling about?”

  “The heart-stone enchantment.”

  The old man understood immediately. “No!”

  “You know how to construct it, don’t you?” said Will.

  “That’s beside the point. It’s evil. Even if I trusted you to use it and release someone afterward, once the knowledge gets out, other people won’t be so principled. I’ve seen it before.”

  “I won’t teach anyone else,” Will promised. “Just Selene and the first group of students, those who are too far along, who’ve already begun using magic. People like Janice.”

  “No.”

  Will frowned. “You won’t even discuss it?”

  Arrogan sounded angry. “You know what I did to eradicate that knowledge! I killed a lot of assholes, sure, but some of them were my friends! There’s no way in hell I’ll willingly bring that knowledge back in to the world.”

  “It’s still in the world. Lognion knows it,” Will pointed out.

  “And you’ve sworn to kill him. Something you might think about expediting, now that we’re on the topic.”

  “I will, when the time is right. Currently we need him to keep Terabinia stable. Overthrowing him while Darrow is waiting for an opportunity to invade would be asking for trouble.”

  “It’s never convenient,” growled Arrogan. “It was the same in my day. They all kept finding excuses to keep their elementals. It was never a good time. Don’t make me regret training you, William.”

  “It’s the only way I can train Selene!”

  “Then too bad!”

  “Don’t you want us to be happy?”

  “Not if it means unleashing that evil on the world again. Your happiness isn’t worth that.”

  “It’s still out there.”

  “Then go kill the king as you promised!”