Mistakes II

Lord Despeke stepped forward from the audience.  He was elderly too, wearing a top hat and three-piece suit over a stiffly starched white shirt with wing-tipped collar.  There was a glint of precious stone at his wrists as his cufflinks caught the light, and he was was carrying a brass fob watch whose chain fell gracefully down to a bar through a buttonhole of his waistcoat.  He was also, Rafe noticed, sweating copiously.

Lord Despeke stood very still for a moment as though gathering his thoughts, and then threw the watch up into the air.  As it reached the peak of its parabolic arc it froze, and though the audience stared at it expectantly, it hung there.  “It is moved out of time,” said Lord Despeke, his voice gravelly as though it wasn’t used much.  “It cannot fall, or be shifted by physical means.  It is, effectively, an impervium.”

Rafe shivered.  When Lord Despeke had cast his spell he’d felt it like a hooked net drawn over his skin.  Back on his homeworld the man would have been skinned and pinned out under the sun for stealing magic like that from anything and everything around him.  There had been no attempt to find the natural source of the power that he needed, or even to find and adapt another source.  There was spill-over from the spell even now; Rafe could sense the drain of magic around the object that went into maintaining the spell because it had been lazily cast and not tied off, made self-contained.  For him, it was ugly and inelegant.

He picked up the fire again because it was there, so close and tempting, and neatly severed the magic around the watch.  He caught it as it fell, and handed it to the stunned-looking Lord Despeke.  Before he could reprove him though, the white-haired woman spoke.  She was now back on her feet, though the girls who had lifted her were still at her sides, supporting her.

“I am less interested in knowing if you can break a spell than I am in knowing if you are capable of similar spells,” she said.  “Can you create an impervium, child?”

Calling him child annoyed him, so he nodded coolly rather than explain his actions.  If all they wanted was effects then he would give them effects.  Let them find out the hard way what the cost of their profligacy with their magic would be.

He reached out again, seeking the magic that Lord Despeke had used, and found a large source of it somewhere inside the halls that they were in.  He marvelled to himself again that these people had access to such vast amounts of power and seemed to have no appreciation for it, and then he let the magic flow through him once more.  He felt himself youthen as it did so, and he had to struggle not to let him just carry him back into genuine childhood.  He halted it, and then pulled it together, and wrapped it around the air in the middle of the hall, and then tied it off.  He opened his eyes, suddenly realising that he’d closed them, and looked at what he’d done.

A black sphere hovered in mid-air in the dead-centre of the room.  Thin black lines radiated out from it dividing the room into sixteenths.  Already some of the audience were touching the lines, pressing against them and even casting small, careless ugly spells at them.  The spells were absorbed, blows were ignored, and nothing could shift the lines or the sphere.

“Solid impervium,” said a man with only a few wrinkles on his face.  “Dear Gods, it’s solid impervium.  This would make the most fantastic armour ever!”

“It’s a trick,” said Lord Despeke flatly,  “It has to be.  No-one knows impervium as well as I do, and he’s a savage.  They don’t even have proper clothes where he comes from!”

“It doesn’t feel like anything,” said another woman.  Her hand was sliding frictionlessly along a black line.  “I can’t feel anything there, but I can’t get past it.  It’s like there nothing at all there, and you can’t go past it because you’d have to fill up the nothing and there’s not enough of you.”

“Sounds dangerous,” said another man.  “Still want to make armour out of it, Arthur?”

“Hells and Heavens, yes!” laughed the nearly-unwrinkled man.  “Armour that can absorb the enemy!  Amazing invention!”

“Impressive,” said the white-haired woman, ignoring Lord Despeke’s snort of contempt.  “Is this something that was useful on your world?”

“It wasn’t something that could be created on my world,” said Rafe.

Mistakes I

Rafe reached out with his mind and almost recoiled.  He’d grown up on a world that he was starting to understand was a very old world, slowly dying beneath an unforgiving, harsh sun.  This world was so much younger and more active, and when he reached for living rock he didn’t have to drive forcefully down hunting for narrow veins of it.  It felt like it was sitting just below the surface of the world, huge and unquenchable, a roaring force that was just waiting for direction.  He couldn’t believe that people in this world could be so blind to it.  He reached out again, just touching the surface of the fire with his mind, feeling its rage and inchoate anger.  It burned and bubbled and yearned to be free.  There were difference in it as well, that he tended to think of as flavours for want of a better word.  There was, in some way he was still trying to understand, different kinds of fire present in this world, and he suspected that isolating them might prove interesting.

“Rafe?”  The woman who spoke was white-haired and wrinkled, shorter than him and leaned on a stick.  He had been told that she was powerful, but as far as he could tell she couldn’t feel the fires beneath the earth’s surface at all.  When he’d tried reaching for the wind was found the roaring, howling madness that existed in the atmosphere here he’d seen a reaction from her, and he suspected that she was some kind of weather specialist.  He tried not to think too badly of her for that.  “Rafe, can you find anything?  Do you think you can do your… magic here?”  The hesitation before she said magic annoyed him, it was as though she didn’t believe him.

He picked the fire and let it find a path through him, burning along his muscles and through his veins, suffusing and infusing him with its energy, and he felt tiredness burn away, toxins evaporate and a healthy glow form around him.  He opened his hands, letting the fire rush into his fingertips, and shaped it as it let loose.  Only then did he really realise how much of it there was.  Though he’d cast this spell hundreds of times before, he expected it to produce a ball of fire that would fit in the palm of his hand and illuminate the inside of a goatskin tent.  This time he produced a ball of fire twelve feet in diameter that filled the room, forcing the audience to press themselves against the walls.  The heat it gave off was like the desert at noon, and it was so bright that he could see it even through his thin, horny eyelids.

He dropped the spell, feeling the fire subside, and the ball of flame persisted for seconds, so long that he worried that it had taken on an independent existence.  Then it winked out and air rushed into the room to fill where it had been, rustling cloaks and dresses and providing a welcome cool breeze.

The woman with white hair was lying on the floor.  Her stick was a line of ash on the floor and she appeared sunburned.  As two of the younger women gasped and then rushed over to her, she levered herself up onto an arm and looked at him, meeting his gaze.

“That was impressive,” she said, “but I don’t think it’s what you intended.  You will need to learn control.”

Rafe nodded.  He knew that for a fact.

“But it was only fire,” she said.  “There are many other aspects of magic as well.”  She waved one of the girls out of the way because she was blocking the white-haired woman’s view of Rafe.  “I would like Lord Despeke to show you an aspect, I think.”