by John Daulton
Just then, Taot let out a long, slow wheeze as he fell into the deepest slumber, breaking Altin from his reverie. The sun had already dropped out of the sky. Altin hopped off the battlements and gazed down at the dark green form of his resting reptilian friend. Somehow the sight of him there made the young mage decide there was no reason why he shouldn’t give divination one last try. Sort of a parting shot, a magical farewell. One last attempt to see if he really was only just a Six. And if he could do it, if he focused this time and truly gave the attempt his full ability, maybe this time, just maybe the gods would answer why, before he let his magic go. Before he blinded the magical eye of his mythothalamus. Besides, if it wasn’t divining that he lacked, then it wasn’t anything. He’d always known, somehow intuitively, that he had never been meant to heal. He was too selfish for that. He knew it instinctively. The recognition didn’t even come with any guilt. Divining had to be the missing link.
He went downstairs to where the Divining for Beginners tome was still lying on the floor. He picked it up and took it to his bed, lighting the candle on the nightstand as he sat down. Curling his feet under him, he sat upon the bed and began to chant the words that would bring a sense of Tytamon’s location to him, wherever the elder wizard was. The divination wasn’t going to work the same as a seeing spell would, nor would it work like a telepathic nudge. According to the book, he would just have an intuitive sense instead. He would have an impression in his mind, an image that he might have to interpret to understand.
As he chanted, allowing the cadence of the child’s song “My Cat’s Paw” to lead him along, his mind wandered to little Pernie who’d been humming it the other day. He could see her in his mind’s eye towing the fawn along. She reminded him of his sister, and Altin suddenly understood why he had never liked the song. Neechy had sung that song. They both had, in the orphanage growing up.
He caught his thoughts drifting and realized he was not focusing on the spell. That or else he just couldn’t do it and he really was a Six. But he was not giving up so easily, and he started once again.
It still didn’t work, and no images of Tytamon came into his head. He went back to the beginning of the book, the parts that he had gone through too quickly, and read them again, this time forcing himself to patience, to the degree of focus that he’d always had for things that were important to him. He read every word twice, despite their childish tone. And then he started chanting once again.
He sat there, cross-legged amongst a nest of wrinkled blankets, with his eyes closed for quite some time, singing the spell and seeking a simple understanding of where his master was, when finally he got the sense that Tytamon was standing in the room. His brows furrowed as he tried to further focus the image down, to refine the impression that seemed as if he’d finally made a divination work, but then Tytamon cleared his throat.
Altin’s eyes snapped open to find that Tytamon was in fact standing at the door. Altin groaned. So much for divining, he thought. He laughed. What a fool. For a moment he’d actually thought the spell had worked.
“Divining, eh?” said his mentor. “I thought you’d given up on that.”
“I had. But I’m trying it again. It’s the least likely school for me to kill anyone with.”
“Oh, you’re wrong about that. Divination is the most dangerous of them all. Why do you think they put it at the top of the circle of schools?” He came into the room and walked over to the window, gazing out into the darkness. He stood there for quite some time before he finally spoke again. “I was going to talk to you about the opening in the wall and about the orcs, but I understand Kettle took that upon herself.”
“Aye, she did.”
A long silence followed as Altin stared absently into his book and Tytamon the night—it seemed Altin had been at it for quite a while.
“So now what?” Tytamon asked. “I divined your mood the other day. You’re in an uncomfortable place.”
Altin nodded.
“That’s why you’ve got that book?” Tytamon indicated the book in Altin’s lap with a nod as he turned back and took a seat at the table in the center of the room.
“Yes.”
“What are you looking for?”
“I just wanted to know why things have turned out the way they have. But I suppose it doesn’t matter in the end. I’m going to quit casting as soon as Taot’s healed.” He paused, and looked up for a moment from the book. “I just wanted to see if I really am a Seven rather than a Six, if being a Seven is why I’ve been nothing but a plague. It’s not in the history of Sixes to kill everyone but themselves. I wanted to know if maybe that’s the Seven’s curse, to kill everyone else instead. At least then I could tell myself I didn’t have a choice.” He expected Tytamon to protest or to say something wise and introspective like he always did, but the old man acted as if he’d barely heard a word.
“Another school would help,” the ancient mage superficially agreed. He reached a gnarled hand out and tore off a bit of Altin’s ever-present bread. Altin regarded the loaf with a shake of his head. He didn’t deserve the service of those people he’d put through such a horrible ordeal.
Tytamon chewed slowly, gazing into the candle sitting near the bread. “I heard Kettle told you about your family. Rumor has it she was a bit more abrupt than I would have been in choosing how to let you know those things.”
“Yes. She let me have it all right.” Altin turned a page in the book, though he wasn’t looking at the words.
“Well, I’d been putting it off. I’m sorry it had to come out like that.”
Altin nodded and turned another page.
“You’re not a bad magician, Altin. And ‘menace’ is too cruel a choice of words.”
“She told you that, eh?”
“Yes, she told me the whole thing. She’s very upset. She didn’t mean to hurt you. She was just afraid. You do know she raised Pernie since the girl was eight months old?”
“Yeah, I know. I don’t blame Kettle. I deserved everything that I got. Probably more.”
“Well, that’s why I came up here. I wanted you to know that you are a good man, Altin. You just get in a rush sometimes.”
“A rush that kills people,” Altin said. Tytamon had never referred to him as a “man” before. It felt… unfamiliar. He let it go. “I really don’t know what I should do. I think burning out my mythothalamus is the safest thing to do.”
Tytamon let him talk, taking another chunk of bread.
“I’ve tried to think if there were maybe some other way. I thought maybe I could become one of those reclusive wizards like you read about in books, stuffed off in some swamp somewhere, isolated from everyone, somewhere where it’s safe. I even thought I might just go live in outer space. I could be the Galactic Mage, far away, safely drifting beneath the stars. No danger to anyone but myself. But that feels like it’s letting me off the hook. And I could change my mind someday, come back. Blinding myself to magic is the only way.”
Tytamon shook his head as Altin spoke, shifting in his chair as if there were something crawling up his leg. But he waited until Altin was through. “Feeling sorry for yourself is not the answer, and you know it as well as I,” he said when Altin was finally done.
Altin went back to flipping through the book.
“Altin, you’re not the first mage to lose someone that he loves.”
Altin groaned silently, sensing that now one of the old man’s stories was on the way for sure. He rolled his eyes, still staring at the page. He knew what he had to do. Tytamon could talk until he was blue in the face; it wouldn’t change a thing.
Tytamon understood the essence of Altin’s resolve and stood up, stepping closer to the bed. “Altin,” he said as the younger mage leafed through the divination book. “There’s something I want you to see.”
The sound of soft fabric collapsing to the floor brought Altin’s attention up from the book to Tytamon. The ancient mage had turned his back to Altin and let his robes slip to the ground
revealing in his nudity a body so scarred and hideously wrecked that Altin had to look away. Half of the old man’s left thigh muscle and buttock were gone; and the flesh up and down his entire left side was wrinkled and twisted far beyond any damage that time could possibly have wrought. He’d been mangled, as if burnt and chewed and soaked in acid all at once, the skin mottled, discolored, and undulant like a meat pie that’s been stomped. It took Altin several moments to recover from the shock.
“What in the name of Mercy’s tears is that?” he asked as Tytamon pulled his robes back up.
“That is the mark of my arrogance, Altin. It’s what happens sometimes to mages regardless of how strong or clever they think they are. I was inches from adding Eights to the list of dead magicians normally saved for Sixes.” Altin’s eyes were wide and staring, rapt, as the old man straightened his garment and returned to the chair and took another pinch of bread. “But that’s not the worst of it, Altin. I, like you, would not necessarily have regretted my own death. That is a price we have always been willing to pay. Both of us. That is an acceptable and familiar risk for mages like you and me. It is harm to others that we must suffer and that we must always try to avoid. And, sadly, despite our efforts, it is often inevitable.”
Altin had to think about that last part for a while. “So what are you saying? That people are just going to die because of me? That I should get used to it? Carry on? Stiff upper lip and all that rot?” Altin couldn’t believe what Tytamon had said. “You can’t possibly be serious. I can’t live like that. I won’t. Not now. Not knowing what I know. If that’s the case, then I’m definitely going to burn my mythothalamus out.”
“You have to find the balance, Altin. There is always middle ground.”
“I’m not interested in middle ground. Not if people are going to die, not everyone that I love. I can’t carry that kind of guilt. Not anymore. That’s something you just can’t understand.”
Tytamon pulled another chunk of bread from the loaf and held it near the candle flame for a while, toasting it absently as he considered Altin’s words. When it was warm enough, he pushed it into his mouth, his moustache squirming above his parchment lips as he chewed. He swallowed and then leaned forward in his chair.
“Her name was Kelline. She was my wife for thirty-seven years. A powerful Four—two Z’s, a W and an H.” He laughed a moment, a sad sound. “You think you can cast big fireballs?” Altin watched him closely and could tell that the old man was on an inward trip. “Anyway, we were young, and I was smart, too smart; I’d convinced myself I was smarter than anyone else alive. And so we decided to go to Kolat and have a look around.”
“Kolat?”
“A tiny island far to the south of Kurr. It’s a terrible place. It’s where I got the Liquefying Stone.”
Altin nodded, his own mind flashing back to that dark spot he’d seen looking down at Prosperion from the moon.
“We heard about it from an old pirate down in Murdoc Bay. He told us stories of a place where the creatures were so horrible and dangerous that the monsters of Kurr seemed soft and cuddly when compared. The pirates call the island ‘The Heart of Magic,’ but nobody ever listens to pirates and their wild tales. Nobody except for me. And I dragged Kelline along.
“Oh, she was happy enough to go, don’t get me wrong. And I’ve allowed myself to recognize that as the years went by, but she’d never have gone had it not been my idea. But we went. We were young and bored. We just wanted to see if the pirate stories were true.
“They were. It is the heart of magic, Altin, but in an unexpected way. You see, the whole island is made of volcanic rock and of Liquefying Stone. There are huge deposits of the stuff everywhere, and it’s almost impossible to cast a spell without being in contact with the stone. Which is why the creatures are so hideous and malformed.
“And they are malformed. You can’t imagine how much so. You’ve never seen such terrible things. Monsters, twisted into forms that are so hideous they are indescribable with words alone.” He whispered a chant under his breath and illusions began to dance about in the air above Altin’s bed, images of beasts that were little more than twisted wads of mangled limbs with eyes and teeth and wings jutting haphazardly from anywhere but where they should have been. The younger mage recoiled in horror with each successive scene. His mind suddenly returned to the misshapen skull on the shelf in the small basement room of Tytamon’s tower. It suddenly made perfect sense.
“Mercy save us,” Altin muttered as he watched the illusions that Tytamon spun before him in the air.
The images winked out a moment later, and Tytamon’s story went on. “But the beasts were not the trouble, Altin. The trouble came from what at some point must have been a race of men. There were tribes of these things, these men, who roamed about the island with appetites to make a swarm of locusts seem a sated lot. They were voracious and savage and cruel, and they had magic that was beyond anything you have ever seen. Animal magic, but tempered by just enough intelligence to make it unstoppable by any force I know. They’d survived the Liquefying Stone, warped and remade, but somehow they’d survived.
“Think about it. An entire race, capable of magic just like us, and one that has miraculously managed to adapt, to live in the excess of the Liquefying Stone, mutated over time by the endless effects of the stone’s presence at almost every cast. They were burnt and warped into something that no longer looked like man, but they were close enough still that Kelline and I could recognize them for what they were, or for what they used to be. And they recognized us as well. And hated us.
“When they attacked us, almost immediately upon our landing on the shore, of course we reflexively began to cast defensive spells. Apparently I was on a patch of sand that had no pieces of the yellow stone in contact with my feet, but my Kelline was not so lucky. The fireball she conjured engulfed us both in flame, but her much more than me. She burnt her mythothalamus out on the spot and never cast another spell.
“I fell to the sand and rolled into the surf, putting out the fire burning through my clothes. Quickly then, I got up and tried to put her out as well. She was screaming, and I knew she couldn’t cast a water spell. I rolled her burning body into the waves. By the time the water extinguished her, it was already too late. She died right there on the beach, in agony, and with me watching the entire time.”
He paused for a long while, and Altin thought perhaps the elder mage would be unable to go on, but at length he got his voice back. “When it finally occurred to me to look to see if our enemies were gone, I saw that Kelline’s fireball had killed them all. She got them. Every last one. She’d saved me as the last act in her amazing life.” He paused again, eyes glassy. “If only she could have lived.”
They both sat silently for a while, Altin unwilling to say a thing. Finally Tytamon shook himself and resumed where he’d left off. “Anyway, that’s when I discovered the Liquefying Stone. I fell to the sand next to her body and screamed and cried for a while, delirious with pain, in my body and in my heart, and then, in that delirium, I tried desperately to bring her back to life.
“As you know, I’m only an F-ranked healer, so I’m lucky to mend a broken toe, but as I was casting uselessly into her decimated body, I began to realize how much mana was pouring in. My leg was lying across a piece of the Liquefying Stone. The amount of mana I was pulling was incredible, and I could stream as much as there was available in the sky. And I did too; I thought the gods were giving me strength.
“But obviously I couldn’t bring her back, not even a Z can resurrect the dead, but still I tried. It wasn’t until later that I figured out that the incredible mana draw was due to the yellow stone.”
Altin nodded, understanding now what price his Liquefying Stone had cost. What it had truly cost. In a way, it made him feel even guiltier than he had before. The price of his progress in human lives was large, and possibly still mounting. The bodies were really piling up, back into time. But he also realized that he was no longer all alo
ne. Tytamon’s tale was no different than his own. Only in the details, in the names of who was dead. He wondered how many more lives Tytamon had taken along his path through magic and a span of eight hundred years.
Tytamon blinked his eyes dry as he finished his tale, but he sat silently for a while, staring blankly into the air. Finally he stood. “She was a good woman, Altin. I’ve never recovered from her death. But she would never have wanted me to quit. And neither would your parents have wanted you to quit. I did not know them, but I am certain I am right. They would not have wanted you to run away.” He walked slowly to the door, turning back to add one more thing before going out. “But that is a choice you have to make. At least I’ve said my piece.”
Tytamon left without another word, just a wan smile as he disappeared down the stairs. Altin watched him go and gave a long and weary sigh. Maybe Tytamon was right. Maybe his parents wouldn’t have wanted him to quit. He just wished they’d lived long enough to say it to him themselves.
Nonetheless, Tytamon’s words opened up the truth that was buried in Altin’s heart. He wasn’t supposed to burn his magic out. He was a caster, and he was doing what he was supposed to do. What everyone wanted him to do.
He began to think of all the people who encouraged him every time they spoke. He thought of Kettle and Aderbury and Doctor Leopold. All of them loved what he’d been doing all these years; they’d attached a tiny portion of themselves to his dream, their hopes linked with his, tied to him and his seemingly impossible quest to reach the stars. He gave them something to root for in a world where life could be empty and often cruel. Blinding his magic or hiding away in outer space would only be another injury forced upon those who cared about him and the wonderful things he might discover with his gifts. He thought of little Pernie then, Pernie who idolized him, who hung on his every word, what would she think if he quit, if he threw it all away, ran from it like a coward into the night? Quitting would let her down most of all. She wanted to be like him. She would never quit, not with her tiny tiger’s heart. He wished he had half the guts she had. But he still had time to make it right.
