My Path to Magic

by Irina Syromyatnikova

  White mages whispered in the corners about their enchanted friends, kidnapped and enslaved; freshmen, eyes round with terror and delight, questioned each other about some priests, but I had no clue about the artisans whatsoever. It must have been something that I was supposed to learn through my family, but I never knew my father-dark, and Uncle did not condescend to enlighten me (though I shouldn't speak ill of the dead).

  I tried to shake my classmates; it didn't pan out. Nobody wanted to elaborate on the topic. And then I recalled who owed me a favor.

  Ironically, Captain Baer was not opposed to a chat.

  "Remember, you promised me an answer to one question?"

  "Yeah, you jackanapes!"

  "I am what I am. So, is your boss aware of the crystal?"

  "Not yet. What do you want to know?"

  "About the artisans."

  "That is a banned topic."

  "Then lift the ban!"

  For some time we looked into each other's eyes, and I got suspicious whether Captain Baer was a veiled uninitiated Dark.

  "Why do you want to know?" he sighed, conceding.

  "They could be a threat to me."

  "I won't show you any documents, of course, but I can tell you if you pledge your word of honor. Okay?"

  "Fine!"

  "Do you know the history of the First Period?"

  I thoughtfully frowned.

  "Okay, let's get more to the point, what is Roland the Bright famous for?"

  "Isn't he a saint?" I ventured to suggest.

  "Not only that," the captain sighed. "Well, let's try a different approach. Imagine that someone in Ingernika still believes that the source of the supernatural has been the dark magicians."

  "Ha-ha!"

  "Have I answered your question?" he raised his eyebrows.

  "No, of course not."

  "Then shut up and listen. Do you think NZAMIPS deals with the dark only? Hell, no! Our main contingent is white magicians. Don't laugh. Try to picture for yourself what a white mage is. I don't believe you can succeed, but try, at least! They put other people on a par with themselves—and not only people. They perceive both positive and negative emotions, without discrimination. Do you understand?"

  I recalled my experience with my own family and involuntarily winced. The captain slightly brightened.

  "It's good if a white mage grew up in a village; they see how nature works and learn about real life. In a sense, they know that rabbits eat grass and people eat rabbits, and they do not put an equals sign between their family and the cows, for example. A city-grown mage cannot put a rabbit in a cage (the animal would feel bad). Their reactions are aggravated to hysteria, and they can do nothing with that—such is their nature. Of course, NZAMIPS does its job, and empaths help, but the issue cannot be fully resolved. Ordinary people laugh at the problems of the white; it's the theme of jokes. And that is a mistake!"

  The captain raised his finger: "A white takes on the entire pain of the world, and the desire to get rid of the pain is a very strong stimulus. For such an incentive they would give away their life. Most of them adapt somehow, especially the initiated ones—they can mute their Source. But some can't or don't want to, or were stressed too much in childhood. The latter becomes a problem: a request to ban eating meat, a fight for the rights of pets, a fight to take sewer rats under protection. Or worse: they bother people and want to teach them how to live 'rightly'. Those latter are our clients."

  From his frequent repetition of the word "white", Rustle's tricks began to revive in my mind, and I decided that it was time to finish the verbiage: "What do the artisans have to do with that?"

  "A lot! The artisans and the like are sects relying on mentally unstable people, mostly from the white mages. They exploit the legend of White Halak (read about it—this topic is not banned) and promise to build a world where everyone would be happy. An ordinary man cannot understand the danger they carry. The dark are almost impossible to manipulate; they're too independent. But the white are trusting, suggestible, and industrious. Before you know it, you are already opposed to the crowd of fanatics who firmly believe that they are fighting for the happiness of all humankind. As a rule, they begin trying to 'treat' or simply exterminate all the dark within their reach."

  "Sweet."

  "And pointless. One could build a world without grief only by annihilating all who could feel compassion. These homegrown saviors are simply unable to grasp the simplest truth: life is suffering; life includes birth, disease, and ultimately death, and that is realistic."

  So, all my visions had some basis, but it remained unclear whether that was good or bad. However, I didn't have deep sympathy for an abstract white—abstraction lacked personality. To Rustle with them!

  "Are these idiots able to accomplish anything serious?"

  The captain shrugged: "People don't really care. In my youth, it was fashionable to believe in good intentions, and the artisans had become almost an official organization. The upshot was that they had covered a whole city by a spell, thinking to save its inhabitants from evil thoughts."

  "Is this possible?" I was shocked.

  "It is possible, but for a very short time. The real White Halak had existed for around seventy years; Nintark hadn't lasted over eight months. They had lost forty thousand 'trial' people and another eight hundred men from NZAMIPS, standing in the cordon."

  "I do not understand. Was that an effect of the white spell that killed them...?"

  "No, it wasn't. It was an unidentified supernatural phenomenon. White mages are absolutely helpless before the otherworldly—even more helpless than ordinary people. The revenant creatures tend to crash a party, and they do not require dark mages to spawn them. Therefore, we will fight these 'activists', no matter where they'll show up and what they'll call themselves. We'll cry and sympathize, but beat them. Got it?"

  I hesitantly nodded.

  "Now answer me," Captain Baer frowned, "was that you who blabbed about Uther?"

  I straightened up shoulders and militantly jerked chin: "Yes, that was me!"

  "Thanks."

  I was taken aback: "For what?"

  He shrugged: "We could have missed the boat with that case, because Mrs. Melons was a doctor. And the capitol authorities advised us not to panic... So, thank you. You did well."

  "You are welcome!" I could offer plenty of such services to them.

  At night I had a dream about White Halak; the fact that I had never seen the town, even in pictures, did not hinder me. People, no different from the ghouls except for their red blood, walked along its streets. They were as the blind—"see no evil, speak no evil"—because they could not even imagine that someone may (and had the right to) grieve, experience pain... die.

  They weren't compassionate; no, they wanted suffering to disappear, and these are two different things. All people should have been healthy and happy, or shouldn't have been at all—the happy zombies did not tolerate the elderly and sick among themselves. In my dream I saw the mighty zombies that protected the borders of the fairy kingdom of White Halak by simply killing any creature that attempted to cross them. The same zombies worked at the factories and fields, because the residents of Halak weren't able to put forth the effort needed for regular work; that is, work when it was necessary, but not when they wanted. Why work? The thirst for deeds could be satisfied in other ways. They walked, ate, and painted strange scrolls on canvas and felt touched by them; they multiplied useless things and sounds; they slept together and did not know what to do with the resulting children—often getting rid of them before their birth. I couldn't picture how the upbringing of children was done in their world, unless they assigned that job to the zombies too: to raise a full-fledged person is hard work, impossible without the use of some coercion.

  Later, the history books talked about the flourishing of arts and sciences but, in fact, the inhabitants of White Halak were not capable of doing anything that required the throes of creation, any somewhat serious effort, or
complicated training. And they did not need it—they lived a pale imitation of life.

  That strange perversion of human nature did not horrify me (by the way, the real undead did not frighten me either), but I felt disgusted. No, better let the white be what I had gotten used to: harmless nitwits. They are not so useless if you take the time to think about them. I would treat them cautiously (I succeeded with Lyuchik), protect and indulge them, and they wouldn't create any extraordinary troubles for me.

  That would be idyllic, wouldn't it?

  Chapter 21

  Finally, the forty days of my quarantine were over. No, not like that. They had ended!!!

  The last two days were especially difficult—the damned otherworldly settled in my head and enjoyed it as much as it could. I physically couldn't stay at home days and nights: clocks had started ticking too loudly. But on the streets a glance at any living object caused in my mind a rapid string of images of his or her past, present and, at times, future. Why the hell did I need to know what the neighbor's dog ate in the morning, why a kitten was hungry, or how a hangover pained Mr. Rakshat? And, as a final touch, I could not read a book about the eviction of Rustle—my vision was failing me.

  I had never believed before that a dark mage could seriously think about suicide.

  I barely managed to last until the end of the forty days, but after the magic date had passed, the problems with the monster abruptly went down. My mind became acclimated, maybe? Bleak hallucinations and moments of sharpened hearing made me shudder a few more times, but then I realized that the problems were gone. The only left over issue was that a thought of the white was giving me willies and reminder that the Rustle-inspired memories would stay with me forever.

  Why did I need alien problems? I had plenty of my own.

  I felt blissfully happy, gradually tying the broken threads of my former plans and events, pondered where to find a buyer for Uncle's rarities, and fondly looked forward to the terrible revenge that I would strike upon the wretched creature. The encyclopedia said that Rustle was practically the only otherworldly phenomenon that a dark mage could summon at will (there were precedents). I wondered how many Rustles existed, and how would I choose the right one? I will challenge them one by one and torture, tantalize, crucify...

  The people around me didn't know the nature of my problems and guessed that I did not have enough sleep. I couldn't care less; let them think what they wanted. I did not see or hear their thoughts anymore, and that made me feel immensely happy.

  But the world had lost its familiar simplicity. The euphoria and temporary insanity that I was awarded by Rustle could not hide the unpleasant fact that people started gazing at me strangely. Did I carry some signs on my face? I asked Quarters straight out and received an unexpected response: "You've, sort of, crossed the road to the artisans."

  "When?!"

  "Did you not get that?"

  I fell deep in thought, sifting through the events of recent difficult days. Well, people with a fairly sick imagination could perceive my talks about Uther as a hostile attack. On the other hand, no malicious sect could surpass Rustle in its meanness; it wasn't realistic. Anything that was less evil I didn't care about, I declared to Quarters.

  "Whatever you say, Tom," he shook his head. "I can't understand you, the dark."

  Brave bully Quarters... scared?

  As it turned out, he was not alone in that. Outside the university, the white moved only in groups of three or four now; they had gone through some kind of "safety" training and became atypically anxious thereafter. Freshmen were counted twice a day, in the morning and in the evening. Students self-organized into patrol groups with men on duty, and these guards imposed the dormitory curfew. I wondered how they intended to make the dark mages observe all these rules. Especially the novice magicians, who were finishing regular classes well after midnight and by the end of the day were in such condition that no artisans were necessary.

  Organizing the dark proved to be easy. They were offered a cab and a free dinner daily. With beer. Freebies! All the dark students appeared right on time, by 12 am, without fail. Even I felt the temptation to freeload in the dormitory and barely suppressed it. Are we, the dark, so predictable?

  These extraordinary measures fostered a serious mood. For a while I honestly tried to scare myself, picturing that I was being hunted by freaks, but could not continue in that vein for long—it was boring. What could they do to me? Kill me? The most horrible thing I could imagine was a burnt out light bulb at the porch and Rustle waiting for me at the door, but that could not happen in the city (knock on wood)—too many ward-off spells were pinned around, and NZAMIPS was on standby. The maximum that I managed to achieve was to develop a habit of looking on both sides of the street and staying sober in unfamiliar places.

  I was not allowed to attend dark magic classes—the doctor from Krauhard informed the university about my injury (what a pathetic snitch; one excuse - he was white). I spent spare time in the library, as a good student.

  I had two topics of interest. The number one was Rustle. Certainly I wasn't the first dark magician it infected; people must have tried to get rid of the creature before, and some reports on the progress made should exist somewhere. I couldn't believe that one of my kind had successfully expelled Rustle and hadn't bragged about it. However, material on the most dangerous otherworldly phenomenon was surprisingly scarce. The reasons for that could be twofold: either Rustle was of no interest to anyone but me (nonsense!), or the results achieved were "not for mere mortals". I needed to ask the captain about Rustle, but instead I inquired about some white idiots.

  Second, Uncle's book burned in my hands. I asked Johan's advice without going into detail and learned that the address on the parcel wasn't even a building—it was a botanical garden. The name also seemed suspicious, for Pierrot Sohane was a character in a fairly well-known fable. Combined, the two facts pointed to a white magician who lived in solitude and kept neutrality. Clearly, he wasn't a merchant, because a seller would not name a buyer "my precious friend" and wouldn't complain, "I hadn't hoped to find you alive". Moreover, he would not persuade in his letter that he "solemnly kept without any selfish interest an 'unnamed something' just for the sake of continuity". A rhythm of these phrases stuffed up my ears, and I wasn't eager to meet the "insignificant master of mirrors". Thus, I needed to figure out what I had in hand not to be strangled at the first attempt to sell the rarity. And what if the book was stolen?

  To identify my treasure was no easier than to pin Rustle down. I couldn't match the text with any known writing style and could not exclude the idea that the content was simply encrypted. The only recognizable elements were numbers at the beginning of each chapter, though there was a chance the numbers were dates, and they would be current in a couple thousand years. My research revealed a similar font in one place, in a copy of the legendary The Word about the King. These were the most ancient extant chronicles, and my treasure looked like a luxurious notebook in comparison. To focus my search, it wasn't enough to just browse through its illustrations—I needed to attain a thorough grasp of the subject and honestly tried, but it was impossible to achieve.

  Of all the historical nonsense discovered, I was pleased with one interesting fact: it turned out that Roland the Bright was a holy dark magician. Funny, Ronald the "Bright" was dark! Well, at least not "white". How this man could stand such a moniker was mind-boggling.

  * * *

  The senior coordinator of the region sat in his office, happy and well-fed, like a big black tomcat. Shadows of thinning foliage fluttered on the walls, creating a feel of the jungle. Locomotive knew that he would never occupy that room again—associations would be too strong.

  "One is apprehended," Satal rumbled.

  Captain Baer gently shook his head: "Why have you decided that Melons was one of the artisans? She is accused of illegal practices and a murder, but that is just one episode. We didn't find any evidence that somebody was behind her. What if she
is just another red herring?"

  "She confessed to the murder too lightly," the coordinator hemmed. "There was a chance that she managed to impose the shackles of deliverance on the first attempt, but why did the peaceful herbalist place the pump-sign on the table top?"

  "The means of inorganic estrangement of the channel," Locomotive corrected habitually.

  "Forget about the terms!" Satal brushed him aside. "There is only one application for the Source that was detached from its managing will—the armory curse. Especially powerful. A peaceful herbalist? Ha!"

  "You propose a special interrogation?"

  "Wanna bet?" Satal snorted. "She will die in our hands under the interrogation, and all the newspapers will shout about the 'police brutality'," the coordinator obviously mimicked someone and was pleased with that. "Let everything go its normal way."

  "Unauthorized use of the shackles," Locomotive stated, "and theft of the Source."

  "Death penalty," the coordinator confirmed, "and I will not permit any advocate to find extenuating circumstances in this case. She was a certified magician and could not be unaware of what she was doing; the fact that the kid died before they managed to find an application for his Source was pure luck. Our luck."

  The dark magician enjoyed the hunt for invisible artisans amidst the stone jungle. The beast followed the trail of another beast—they were human beings only partially... Locomotive blinked, driving off an ugly image. The dark could not behave differently, but Baer was a regular human being—he had to take care of people instead of Satal.

  "Our guy came into the spotlight in this case."

  The coordinator got a little distracted from his triumph: "Leave him. You won't do anything."