Enchanter (Book 7)

by Terry Mancour

  As fun as it was setting up the shop, that winter the real work was going on in my own workshop in the castle – and in Dranus’ smaller workroom in his tower. Even with the additional room gained by moving my bedroom had provided the place seemed crowded most of the time. There was always someone using a corner of the shop, or reading in the lower room, or using the top of the tower to test some enchantment or another.

  Taren had spent the free time familiarizing the other wizards working on the effort with how to use the pocketstones and other specialty enchantments of Sevendor. That had led to an intriguing few days of experimentation, as they tried various essays with the pocketstone.

  Taren demonstrated a crossbow he as working on that produced an iron bolt from an arcane pocket – a hoxter, according to the ancient enchanters – the moment the string was drawn over the nut. Planus created a silver wine goblet that he could fill with gallons of wine and refill with a word. The Remeran adept enchanted the amulet that held his witchstone so that it would also produce a comfortable chair when he desired. Rael used the stone to make a magical bracer for her left arm that could contain dozens of sacks of supplies and samples to be called upon at need.

  Master Andalnam made a cloak pin that could hold just about anything . . . but the enchanter was getting restless as the first late autumn snowflakes fell on the vale. He wanted to start on the more elaborate projects, particularly the thaumaturgical baculus he was designing.

  “That should probably be our first endeavor,” he counseled, after everyone had shown off their early experiments at the group’s regular odeum, where we showed off our work for the week. “Tools to make tools. We all have our specialties – if we are able, let us create them according to our needs.”

  “Lanse of Bune and Master Cormoran are still on their way here, but I suppose we can get started on the basic enchantments,” Taren pointed out. “Thaumaturgical wands, in particular. We’ll need a lot of them. Banamor has the finest supply of weirwood and other materials in the Riverlands. Anything we want from his stock we can put on the castle’s account.”

  “That could get expensive,” warned Planus. “Good weirwood is dear. Great weirwood is priceless.”

  “Priceless is a relative term,” I chuckled. “I’m funding this enterprise, remember? I’ve had more than a dozen of the finest staves brought to the shop upstairs. I suppose we should get this advanced concillibule started by having everyone pick out the one that they like.” A concillibule, for those who don’t know, is a group of enchanters convened for a particular purpose, like a working group. Don’t feel bad. I didn’t know, either. I added it to the list for indexing.

  I let them all poke through the long reddish staves, sanded smooth and ready to enchant, because I had already secured the absolute best piece for myself. Or at least the one I thought best suited my purposes.

  What makes one piece of wood better than another for enchantment? Without delivering a technical lecture on the subject, it’s mostly about durability and capacity. Most woods make fine conduits for arcane power, thanks to the organic structure of the cellulose, but beyond that things get complicated. Some woods channel energies better than others, and some aren’t very good for much more than minor cantrips or very short-term spells.

  But weirwood is different. The cellulose in the wood is well-tuned to arcane power as the plant requires it to grow and propagate. It can bear very strong magical energies without degrading, and do so over and over again with little loss of effectiveness. There are varieties that do better with some channels than others, but often it comes down to the character of the individual piece of wood.

  The rod I’d chosen was about five feet long, an inch and a half thick and it had faint streaks of green running through it. The grain was very fine, which usually indicates an especially delicate ability to control power – important in a thaumaturgical baculus, less so for a warstaff.

  The difference is important. I had created other powerful enchantments on my own with weirwood, namely my warstaff Blizzard and my traveling staff Trailblazer. Both were very powerful, each in their way. Blizzard was designed to kill people and break stuff, while Trailblazer was the most useful travel tool any mage had ever carried.

  A thaumaturgical baculus is designed to be used to aid a thaumaturge in his work. Instead of channeling huge amounts of power, its utility lay in its ability to discern and manipulate the smallest of energies. There are a few things one expects any such tool to perform – taking etheric density readings, for instance. Usually a mage will use a savistator, a fairly simple and inexpensive device if he’s assessing etheric density. But with the base of a well-made baculus to work from, there were much more accurate and finely-tuned spells that could do it better.

  There were other enchantments that could be set that would gauge the arcane conductivity of a substance, for example, or powerful magesight augments that could allow you incredible perception. Detection and determination spells, enchantments to regulate power flow, spells to convert or entrain energies, spells of containment, spells of banishment – a good thaumaturgical baculus can do a lot.

  These were better than good. The elementary enchantments everyone agreed upon for their own device, based on my notes from Pentandra’s baculus, were quickly supplemented by other spells as each mage’s staff began to reflect their enchanter’s personal idiosyncrasies.

  It took days. We took turns in the workshops (our mirabiliaries, for those keeping up with the jargon), or worked with our rods in private – and yes, I realize just how dirty that sounds. The phallic nature of the item was referenced several times. We were a bunch of adult professionals playing with long thin sticks. Penis jokes abounded.

  Then Master Cormoran and Lanse of Bune arrived, and it turned into a real party.

  Both enchanters had brought most of their magical households. Cormoran picked up two eager apprentices, while Lanse’s troupe of miniature-making specialists arrived with two entire wagons containing his traveling workshop.

  Lanse’s work as a dioramic mage was one of the few specialties that encouraged a large retinue. It took a lot of work to get the representations looking and feeling just right to the operator, or something like that. Detail was essential to the success of the spell, and that mandated a lot of time-consuming work . . . just the sort of thing a bunch of apprentices were useful for.

  I put them up at Jurlor’s Hall, at my expense. Both men – and all of their entourage – were fascinated by the town and the mountain and the castle and the Alka Alon tower, and the Karshak works, and the Everfire . . .

  But they weren’t truly impressed until they saw what we had been up to. It took them all a few days to catch up, but soon around twenty dedicated enchanters were each creating a thaumaturgical baculus of great power. Work was expanded by necessity to the Enchanter’s Guild’s moderate workspace to contend with the overflow.

  It was a merry time, as if a bit of the Magic Fair lingered in Sevendor through the first early chill of winter sleet.

  As the leaves turned a brilliant scarlet and burnished gold, besmocked enchanters wearing the colete – a skull cap associated with the profession - walked between town and castle in ones or twos, or sometimes in larger groups . . . and if the taverns along the way prospered as a result, no one was unhappy about it.

  Many magi who were not officially a part of the effort frequented the taverns and halls to discuss the efforts or share their own research. The enchanters who staffed the manufactory were frequent colleagues, and many of them ended up joining the effort in some small way. There was always more cleansing and examination of raw materials than we had the personnel to complete.

  Those excursions into drink and theory were perhaps more important than the actual enchantments we were casting. They were actually a recognized part of the old process, called cenacules in antiquity. It was recognized by our professional ancestors that often the best work was done not over a workbench, but over wine and food. So each working group met regular
ly, if informally, and invited enchanters from outside the group to listen to the progress and share their perspectives.

  As each of us encountered problems, or tried to achieve a particular result, we’d toss around ideas and solicit advice from specialists or bullshit-opinion from the bystanders at large at these cenacules. With enough ale, wine, and spirits the discussions could get quite lively, and could occasionally lead to demonstrations or even theoretical breakthroughs.

  While there was no set group of us, I noted that particular magi tended to congregate in specific areas for informal cenacules. Lanse and his men tended to drink at the Spark and Scroll, the dive that catered to the Enchanters Guild and the magi who tended the Mirror array at the Order Chapterhouse (the Entropomants who tended the Entropiary, according to the texts). Cormoran didn’t drink there, but his apprentices and servants did.

  While Planus technically lived closest to the Spark and Scroll, staying as he was at the Secret Tower, he preferred the atmosphere and the wine of the High Street tavern Banamor owned, the Alembic. It was half the size of the Spark and Scroll but Banamor had stocked it with pricy wines and spirits suited to a Remeran palate. He’d founded it while I was off marching so that he and his business associates could have a quiet place to drink and negotiate without the noise of the market or a busy tavern around them. He kept the prices high enough to discourage casual drunks, but the wealthy magi had no trouble affording the fare or the privacy.

  The Alembic drew Dranus on many nights, as they had a basic set of Rushes, as well as chess and that game with black and white stones I never bothered to learn how to play. Master Cormoran also favored its more refined atmosphere. Master Ulin could be found there occasionally, drinking the cheapest of beverages, unless someone else was buying.

  The Alembic had the advantage of reams of parchment lying around, something Banamor supplied as a service for the patrons. Many late night conversations by magelight and brandy fumes culminated in intriguing work that was captured on those sheets. Lorcus also liked writing dirty poetry and hiding it among the leaves to scandalize the other patrons. It was part of the charm of the place.

  But the real intellectual free-for-all ended up being at an old shed in the outer bailey someone – I still don’t know who – had turned into a clandestine drinking establishment, right under the very nose of the baron.

  The place was an old shed that had been used variously as a barn, a byre, a storehouse, a temporary kennel, and had been left to languish empty or cluttered as needed in the far corner of the outer bailey. I had always figured we’d eventually get around to knocking it down, but we just hadn’t, yet.

  Some enterprising soul had taken a hogshead of beer into the place and started serving there. Mostly castle folk who didn’t want to walk all the way into town for serious drinking, at first, but by the time I’d returned from Kasar the tiny tavern had blossomed. One of the Tal, a portly fellow called Radish who worked in the stables during the mornings, had assumed the role of tavernkeeper. He made a few coins a week selling strong beer that way, and seemed well-suited to the task.

  Eventually it became clear to Sire Cei what was going on, but despite my castellan’s regulatory nature he saw little harm in the secret public house within stumbling distance of the castle. He even stopped in once a month or so to inspect the technically illegal brew – Cei likes strong beer as much as any knight.

  Once the visiting magi discovered the place they chased most of the other patrons away and adopted it as their own, visiting it before or after enchantment sessions in my tower or Dranus’. I didn’t even know the place was really there, until Planus introduced it to me one evening. I was, in a manner of speaking, enchanted with its rustic charm. The broken furniture, the poor lighting, the slight scent of mildew . . . it made the perfect little dive to loiter in between spells. By the end of the night I had drunkenly decreed that the place be officially allowed to continue operations without my official notice, which confused the hell out of everyone.

  As the place didn’t have an official name, and I wanted one that captured both its character and its place as a uniquely Sevendori establishment, I dubbed it The Slushpile – where all the dirty snowflakes accumulate in the shade.

  I had some changes made to it – Radish was employed full-time, at livery, and the stores were improved with a little additional capital from my purse. I detailed a carpenter to make some repairs to the roof and walls, and had a new privy dug out back. I kept the obscuring line of rhododendrons in front of the place to keep it from being an eyesore, but once you got behind them it was actually kind of quaint. I had a few rolls of parchment, ink, and charcoal supplied, as well as a slab of snowstone that took up most of one wall. It wasn’t for magical effect, though I enchanted magelights into it, it was to serve as a large board upon which magi could work problems in charcoal or demonstrate theories to each other over a good pint of ale.

  It wasn’t exclusively a magi pub – any tavern across the yard from the hall where my Dad is staying is going to get flour in it – but once the enchantment project began it became enough of a favorite of my colleagues that it was considered a wizard’s pub.

  Besides, I got to drink for free. Perks of being the baron.

  The point of enumerating the favored drinking establishments of magi in Sevendor isn’t, as you might imagine, a scheme to improve my revenues from increased tourism. Because those taverns became hotbeds of competing and complementary theory over the weeks of winter, as the work of the effort began in earnest the cenacules of Sevendor became the blossoming gardens of innovative thaumaturgical theory.

  The Alembic was the school of high theory, where the most erudite of magi (myself included by courtesy, if not by merit) discussed the finer points of thaumaturgic theory, especially enneagramatic magic. The Spark & Scroll school was focused on the practical issues of enchantment. And the Slushpile was reserved for wild flights of thaumaturgical fancy, up to and including theurgy and alien forms of magic.

  As the snows of winter came, and the leaves were driven from the trees, the first forays into greater enchantment were being made by my colleagues. The first great baculus spells were cast as the cleansed and bonified staves were carefully shaped and crafted. The first serious consideration of paracletic enchantment was being made at those friendly, intense discussions over winter duck and fresh meat pies. And wine. Lots and lots of wine.

  My interests and energies were spread among all three schools, all of the workshops, and frequently found me reading in my tower until long past midnight. I spent hours in meditation and spellwork during the day, then engaged in lively discussions during the evening hours before either devoting myself to serious study or serious spellwork, as the occasion demanded.

  Things with Alya started to get a little frayed as my technical presence but practical absence began to be felt. I made a point of taking her to some of the cenacules, and also taking breaks from work to spend a few evenings with the children and my wife. Our intimate relations were tentative and distracted, ostensibly because of work.

  But the fact was I was using my vocation to hide from my own feelings. When I was indulging in the technical challenges of enchantment, I wasn’t worrying about my anger, or Isily’s plans, or the humiliation I felt about her assault. My work became my haven from my own feelings, but it alienated me from my wife.

  Alya could tell something was wrong. She couldn’t bring herself to say it, exactly, but she told me so in a hundred little nonverbal ways. If anything good came of my withdrawal from her during that time it was the renewed focus I put on my children.

  Minalayn was talking in full sentences, now, using his new voice to be as demanding and entitled as a little princeling. He was just starting to get to be real fun. Amina, for her part, held a monopoly on pure cuteness in my household that demanded proper respect and admiration. The nights I devoted to my family during the Sevendor Bouleuterion remain precious in my mind as the fulfillment of my paternal dreams. The only stain
on the memory involves the pensive looks Alya gave me when she thought I wasn’t looking.

  It was killing me not to confide in her, unburden my soul and cleanse my conscience . . . but then the consequences of doing that were clear enough to me. It was easier sacrificing my inner peace and tranquility than inflicting my rage and despair on my innocent wife and forcing her to endure a burden she did not earn.

  We had a lovely family. I couldn’t let anything bad happen to it.

  Particularly me.

  *

  *

  “The sophistication of these spells demands paracletion,” Master Ulin argued, a little tipsily, that night at the Alembic. “Entrusting the agent-of-action to the same mind that is focused on obduracy is folly!”

  “Some minds are better than others,” Planus smiled back. “Paracletion seems a powerful answer to a simple problem.”

  “It’s only a simple problem because we don’t have the capacity to consider more sophisticated enchantments,” Andalnam pointed out. “Paracletion does mitigate that, dependent on the enneagram used.”

  “Ah, and now we come to the sharp point of the debate,” Banamor said, expansively. “What creature would you entrust to a task like that?”

  “It’s not a matter of the creature,” explained Master Ulin, passionately. “It’s a matter of their enneagramatic remains, and what pathways you wish to exploit for the work. If an ordinant can transfer the pattern without the use of a benet, eschewing deracination of the living in favor of dissamuring from the enneagramatic archive of the Grain with a suitably docimased bridewell, then both the ethical and practical issues of flagitation and paracletion are solved at once,” he stated, triumphantly.

  “I have no idea what he just said,” admitted Master Cormoran, drunkenly. “But damn, he said it well!”