Lombardi chuckled, then produced a sheet of paper for himself, with a list of different spell components. He ran his eye down it before passing the sheet to Emily. She studied it, feeling something nagging at the back of her mind. It wasn’t until she skimmed through the third component that she realized what it was.
“These components are complete spells in their own right,” she said, aloud. Or were they? None of them had a startpoint, or an endpoint. “You can string several different spells into one large spell ...”
“That’s the advanced class,” Lombardi said, seriously. “But seeing that students can’t resist experimenting, make sure you test each strand of the spell carefully before you try to activate the entire chain of spells. A single mistake when so many components are strung together can cause rapid mutation, followed by either collapse or disaster. Most magical accidents are caused when some idiot didn’t check his work carefully before proceeding.”
Emily nodded, thinking back to webpage design. It was easy enough to take something–from a JPEG picture to an embedded video or game–and insert it into a webpage, but the webpage designer wouldn’t actually have designed the component himself. Picking the wrong spell to insert into a combined spell could be disastrous if they didn’t go well together, just like the wrong piece of embedded programming could cause a webpage to crash, or simply refuse to display properly.
“You’ll note that they have nothing to say as to where they start or end,” the Professor pointed out. “Adding a second startpoint would almost certainly cause the combined spell to separate into two different components, which would promptly start working against one another. I’ll demonstrate that in class later for you and your classmates. An endpoint would bring the combined spell to a screeching halt at that point, leaving the rest of the spell inactive–or doing something you don’t want it to do. Could be harmless, could be disastrous; again, I’ll demonstrate it for you in class.”
“And if someone were to bury an endpoint inside a spell, which was then used as a component for someone else’s spell, it might wreck all of their work,” Emily mused. It seemed absurd to think that anyone would create a combined spell without checking it carefully, but if there had been magical accidents ... well, she’d always thought that there was no shortage of fools in the world. “Can you do that?”
“You’re learning,” Lombardi said. He tapped the parchment meaningfully. “I want ... let’s see. I want you to devise a spell that will pick up the pencil and then move it over to the table in the corner. Take your time; don’t try to form the spell in your mind. Write it all down on the parchment, step by step.”
Emily looked at the list of spell components, trying to see how they all went together. It should have been simple, yet every component had its own sub-components, with their own variables. She felt an odd flash of sympathy for Alassa as she stared at the parchment. Right now, she was doubting her own capabilities too. A single spell ...
... But it wasn’t a single spell; she had to build it up out of building blocks that were themselves spells.
Taking the pencil in hand, she started to write out what she wanted the spell to do, section by section. The starting point, the first set of variables, the second set of variables ... each of them had to be altered, but once she had a roadmap of the entire spell she could start to put it together. Looking back at the list of components, she wrote out the first two on the parchment.
“Ah,” Lombardi said. He’d been watching her like a hawk. “Hold out your hand, palm upwards.”
Emily blinked.
“Hold out your hand, palm upwards,” Lombardi repeated. “Now, if you please.”
She hesitated, and then obeyed. A second later, he snapped a ruler across her palm, causing her to cry out in pain and shock. “It is an extremely bad idea to write a startpoint before you are ready to cast the spell,” he said. He didn’t sound angry, but Emily still flinched at his tone. She’d been warned, if not very clearly, and she’d done it anyway. The whole thing had been a test to see how closely she was following him. “Very bad habit. Try to get rid of it.”
Emily glanced at her palm–and the angry red mark where he’d struck her–and felt herself flushing in embarrassment. Angrily, she scored out the starting point and started again, writing out the variables one by one. A third set of variables was required, it seemed; she added it to the spell and checked through it as carefully as she could. Balancing so many variables was hard enough on paper; doing it in her head, she suspected, would be a great deal worse. How had Shadye and Void managed to master their talents without driving themselves crazy?
Or crazier, in Shadye’s case.
“Here,” she said, finally. Her palm still stung with dull pain. “How does this look?”
Lombardi cast his eyes down it, thoughtfully. “No startpoint,” he said dryly. “I would prefer not to have to repeat that point again. How many pencils do you want to lift?”
Emily looked up from where she was rubbing her hand. “Just one. I thought...”
“There’s more than one pencil in this room,” Lombardi interrupted. “Next time, specify that you only want one pencil to be affected. Depending on how much mana you pump into the spell, you could accidentally cause havoc in the classroom.”
“... Because every pencil would be affected,” Emily said, thoughtfully. She cursed herself under her breath. How had she missed that? “I’ll change that...”
“Not yet,” Lombardi said. He tapped the next spell component. “How high do you want the pencil to go?”
Emily realized her mistake and winced before he could point out her second mistake.
“The pencil is going to crack into the ceiling,” he informed her. “Oh, and it’s going to rise up fast enough to shatter when it hits. Next time, specify both height and speed–unless you intend to use it in combat. A very fast-moving stone can be a terrifying weapon.”
“You wouldn’t even need to set a target,” Emily guessed. “You could just throw it in the right direction and wait for it to hit.”
“Correct,” Lombardi agreed. He reached the third section. “Interesting approach to the problem, but tell me; why didn’t you simply designate the table as the destination, rather than carefully writing out a movement pattern?”
“I didn’t think of it,” Emily admitted. At school, she’d had to program a tiny robot to move from one part of the room to the other. They’d had to be very specific–drive forward two meters, turn ninety degrees to the left, drive forward one meter, turn ninety degrees to the right, etc–and she’d assumed that she had to program the pencil’s course in the same way. But she could just add the table as another variable ...
“It can be worth exploring different angles,” Lombardi said. He rubbed his hands together cheerfully. “You never know what you might learn.”
He returned to his desk, reached into his drawer and produced a large leather-bound book with a golden eagle inscribed into its cover. “This is your personal grimoire. The charm on the book is such that no one will be able to read it without your permission, at least until after your death. You are expected to write your own spells and note them down in the book for future reference. If you run out of paper, I will provide you with a second book.”
Emily took it, staring down at the golden writing. It was hers, hers in a way that Void’s gift would never be able to match. The blank pages just seemed to be waiting for her to start writing down ideas, and her own personal thoughts and schemes. And thankfully no one else would be able to read it. She’d known girls who had been dreadfully embarrassed when their blogs, Facebook pages and Live Journals had been exposed to the world.
“And if you lose it,” Lombardi added, “you’ll regret it until the day you die.”
Chapter Twelve
“HE DOES THAT ALL THE TIME, I’m afraid,” Imaiqah said, at lunch time. She was seated with Emily, eating something that tasted suspiciously like curry. “The last time someone left out a crucial part of a spell, it n
early killed the four people who were standing close to the caster.”
“Oh,” Emily said. The mark on her palm hadn’t faded and it was still throbbing with a dull ache. She’d never been struck like that in her entire life. “I ... I thought that getting hit like that was child abuse.”
Imaiqah gave her an odd look. “And nearly killing someone because you didn’t check the spell very carefully isn’t?”
Emily shrugged, then shook her head. For all she knew, Imaiqah might regard corporal punishment as just another part of life.
She hadn’t known many people from different cultures, at least before Shadye had kidnapped her, but the ones she had known had often been subtly different from the rest of her former classmates. They’d been brought up to have different ideas about how the world worked, or what was acceptable in modern society–and rarely questioned those ideas. She couldn’t imagine how any girl could simply marry a boy selected by her parents, but she’d known girls who calmly expected that it would happen in their future.
So perhaps Imaiqah’s attitude wasn’t so different after all.
Emily had to admit that Imaiqah–and Lombardi–had a point. Magic was dangerous. Emily had been warned time and time again. She still thought of it as something akin to a computer language, but maybe it was more like playing with a loaded gun; you had to know what you were doing before you picked up the weapon. And yet Alassa clearly didn’t know what she was doing before casting her spells ...
...But Alassa did know what the spells were meant to do. Perhaps that was enough, at least in the short run.
She tossed the idea around and around in her head as they ate. If a magician cast a spell without knowing what the spell was meant to do, would the spell work? Logically, it should work–but magic didn’t appear to be very logical. But a computer language wasn’t randomized; it would work even if the user didn’t know what it was meant to do. The user might simply be unable to realize the full potential of the language.
“No computers here,” she mused. The trick to actually working magic was to cast the spell in your mind and charge it with mana, maybe comparable to calculating a formula in your head. But what if someone invented the magical equivalent of a pocket calculator, or a computer? There were limits, she suspected, to spells that could be cast by human magicians. But a computer, on the other hand, should have no difficulty in casting a spell composed of thousands of different components. “I wonder if a computer would actually work?”
She’d read of any number of fantasy universes where technology had simply refused to work, either because the author had determined that technology was incompatible with the laws of her universe or because the author in question been a great believer in the evils of technology. Clearly, those authors had never had to live in a world with lousy plumbing, much less antibiotics and modern sewage. But their concept made no sense at all. The basic laws of the universe had to be identical to Earth’s laws or it was quite possible that the human race wouldn’t be able to exist at all. Changing a universal constant might kill the entire planet.
But universal constants were changed. People could be turned into statues, or frogs–so what happened to the rest of their mass? Even the smallest student at Whitehall would have far more mass than a frog; logically, that mass had to go somewhere else. And yet if it was permanently separated from the spell’s victim, wouldn’t that be the same as killing her?
Unless magic is grafted on, Emily thought.
Maybe all the universal laws worked as they did back home, but magic–mana–also existed. How could she test that theory?
A finger nudged her. “You were staring off into space,” Imaiqah said, concerned. “And you were muttering. Are you all right?”
“I was thinking,” Emily said. She shook her head. If she’d paid more attention to her classes at her old school, she might have been better prepared for scientific experiments. She didn’t have the slightest idea where to even start building a computer, or a car, or pretty much anything else that she’d taken for granted back home. A thought struck her and she smiled. “Do you know if there are engines that run on steam?”
Imaiqah blinked in surprise. “What do you mean?”
Putting it into words was harder than Emily had expected. The basic concept behind steam engines wasn’t that difficult to understand, once she had worked out the gaps in her knowledge and deduced the solutions. Build a tank of water and heat it until the water became steam, then push the steam through pipes at force, using the pressure to produce motive power. That power could be used to run a very basic railway engine. Logically, it could be used to run a car too, but she’d never heard of a steam-powered car in real life. Maybe the engine had to be larger than a certain size to actually work properly.
“I’ve never heard of anything like it,” Imaiqah said, finally. “People just use the roads to get from city to town, if they get to travel at all.”
“Right,” Emily said. Of course, people who lived in a medieval society wouldn’t go halfway around the world for a holiday. They might not even recognize the concept of taking a holiday, not when their world was still under the delusion that aristocrats had a right to rule and the lower classes were there to serve. “How far does your father travel in his job?”
Imaiqah gave her an odd look. “He doesn’t. He owns a shop in a city.”
Emily shook her head ruefully. No big multinational corporations in this world, thankfully. Everything was on a much smaller scale. For all she knew, the necromancers hadn’t managed to match Hitler or Stalin in slaughtering helpless victims. And to think that Imaiqah’s father was actually one of the most successful businessmen in the world, at least according to Imaiqah. On Earth, he would have been considered nothing more than the owner of a “Mom and Pop” grocery store.
An idea struck her and she smiled. “If I was to send your father ideas for products, would he try to market them?”
“Maybe,” Imaiqah said. She frowned, thoughtfully. “But he wouldn’t want to gamble everything on one product.”
It took Emily a moment to realize what she meant. Building a steam engine would be difficult in this world, as producing advanced metals was much harder. She’d already realized that aluminum was rarer than gold; now, she saw that there would be no steel or metal composites either. Even a small steam engine to test the concept would be incredibly expensive.
I should have brought a few good scientific textbooks with me, she thought, sourly. But Shadye hadn’t exactly given her time to pack. Something that would tell me the practical background that I never learned at school.
She bounced another question at Imaiqah. “What sort of money do you use in your kingdom?”
Imaiqah looked at her. “Where do you come from? Gold, silver and bronze coins, of course.”
Emily thought about trying to explain the concept of paper money, or credit cards, before realizing that it would be a waste of time. “And those coins are actually made out of real gold?”
“Well, of course,” Imaiqah said. “What else would they be made of?”
“So I could take a gold coin from Umbria and spend it in Cayce?” Emily asked. “Or could I transfigure a bronze coin into gold?”
“You could spend a gold coin anywhere,” Imaiqah said, slowly. “My father would weigh the coin to calculate how much it is actually worth, but gold is gold. Transfiguring something into gold ... there are laws against that everywhere. You could be hung!”
Emily wasn’t surprised. If one lived in a world where magicians could use magic to turn lead into gold, surely the value of gold would plummet though the floor. But if they had a way of testing the gold to ensure that it was real gold ... they’d have to have such a method, or their economy would have collapsed long ago. Or perhaps changing more than a tiny amount of lead into gold was incredibly difficult. Maybe that explained why the economy was on such a small scale.
She’d need money, both for experiments and to keep herself fed and clothed. And she had no particula
r compunction about stealing ideas from her world and claiming that they were her original inventions. But what could she introduce that she actually knew how to produce?
It struck her–not for the first time–that she was terrifyingly ignorant. Back home, she hadn’t had to know anything about how technology worked in order to use it. Now, she was trapped in a world that knew nothing about the scientific method–and she didn’t know enough to introduce it herself. Or maybe this world knew a method that involved magic, rather than science, because magic twisted the very structure of the world.
The next period was a free period, so she went back to her bedroom and cracked open the first of the library books. One glance was enough to show her how Alassa could cast so many spells and yet know almost nothing about how they worked. There was no explanation of the variables, or how they went together, merely a formula for the magician to run through her mind. A very simple hex–the book claimed that it gave its intended target a nasty pinch–used only three components. The designer had crammed all of the actual formula into a single component.
Carefully, Emily copied the spell down into her own book–being careful to leave out the startpoint–and broke the spell down to see how it went together. It was surprisingly simple, but looking at the variables convinced her that she’d better be very careful if–when–she started modifying them. Altering the variable that governed how hard the target was pinched might be enough to crush bones and kill outright. Another spell seemed to give hypnotic suggestions to its target, suggestions that could cause considerable embarrassment before they wore off.
And to think they gave these mental manipulation spells to kids!
She opened the book of protective spells and found a handful that provided basic protection against charms and hexes. Working out how to cast them was trickier than it seemed; unlike the pinching spell, the protective spells had to be run constantly in her mind. Emily couldn’t see how to cast two spells at once until she realized that she’d taken the computer analogy too far. She could cast the spell and leave it fixed in place until she dismantled it.
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