Taking Flight

Chapter Twenty

By the time they reached the inn Irith’s wings were gone, and some of her annoyance was gone as well. She didn’t so much as grimace when she realized that she would be paying for everything.

“At least we’ll be comfortable in here,” she said.

The inn was arranged with tables along the walls and high backs to the benches that accompanied them, forming booths and providing an unusual degree of privacy. The three of them took one of these booths and ordered two ales and a lemonade from a young man with an apron and a tray.

As soon as the young man had departed, Asha asked Irith, “How could you watch us without us seeing you?”

Irith sighed. “Do I really have to tell you?”

“I think so,” Kelder said. “At least, if you want us to travel with you.”

“All right, then,” she said. “Mostly I was either a cat or a bird; sometimes I was invisible, but I have trouble with that.”

“What’s ‘invisible’?” Asha asked.

“It means I’m still there, but nobody can see me. Except it’s not comfortable and I can’t see very well when I do it, and it only lasts a few minutes, so mostly I didn’t get very close or anything, I just stayed a bird and flew overhead, or a cat and watched you from a distance. Except cats and birds... well, cats can’t hear low noises very well, so I couldn’t hear what anyone was saying when I was a cat. Birds can hear low noises, but they don’t hear very well sometimes. So when you were coming up the cliff I snuck up close as a cat and then turned invisible and listened, and you were talking to that old man and he was talking about going to Shan with me years ago, but he didn’t, I never went there with him!”

“You’re sure of that?” Kelder asked.

“Of course I’m sure! I never traveled with that scruffy old drunk!”

“Well, he wasn’t a scruffy old drunk, back then,” Kelder pointed out.

“When?” Irith demanded.

“Forty years ago — forty-three, I think it was, actually.” Kelder watched her reaction closely. Would she be surprised, declare the whole idea of her doing anything forty years ago to be ridiculous?

“Forty years ago?” Irith stopped and stared.

That was ambiguous, Kelder thought; she hadn’t dismissed it as ridiculous, but she hadn’t accepted it, either. “Were you around forty-three years ago?” he asked.

“Well, of course I was, but I wasn’t associating with dirty old men!”

There it was. She had been around back then; it wasn’t her mother or grandmother. Asha stared. Kelder swallowed, and said, “He was nineteen, maybe twenty.

“Oh,” Irith said, taken aback. “Oh, I guess he would have been, wouldn’t he?”

Kelder nodded.

“I hadn’t thought of that,” she said.

“Did you know him?”

She frowned. “I don’t know,” she said. “What’s his name?”

“Ezdral.”

Irith stared. Her eyes grew wider than Kelder would have thought possible.

“Ezdral?” she said. “That’s Ezdral of Mezgalon? It really is?”

“That’s what he says,” Kelder told her.

“I was sort of afraid it might be somebody I knew once, you know,” Irith said, the words spilling out in a rush. “And I really hated to think about anyone I know getting old and icky like that, and drinking so much and lying around, so I didn’t like it when he said he knew me and I wanted to get away from him — but I never thought it might be Ezdral!” She blinked. “That’s awful!”

“He says you traveled with him when he was young, and then one day he woke up and you weren’t there.”

“Well, that’s sort of true,” Irith admitted. “I mean, I was there, at first, but he didn’t see me. And I’ll bet he didn’t mention that we’d had a fight the night before, did he? Or that he’d been being a real pest, talking about all this stupid stuff about settling down and raising kids.”

“What’s stupid about it?” Asha asked, before Kelder could react.

“I’m too young, that’s what!” Irith said quickly.

Asha and Kelder looked at each other. Kelder’s visions of a life of domestic bliss with Irith suddenly seemed much less attainable.

“Oh, it was all a long time ago, anyway,” Irith said.

“Irith,” Kelder said, “it was a long time ago, more than forty years ago, but you keep saying you’re only fifteen.”

“I am only fifteen!” she retorted angrily.

“How are you only fifteen?” Kelder asked. “Where were you between then and now? Were you under a spell or something?”

“A spell?” Irith stared at him.

“Turned to stone, maybe?”

“Silly,” she said, almost laughing, “of course not! I’ve been traveling, enjoying the World.”

“For forty years?”

“Longer, really.”

“How long?”

“Oh, well...”

“How long?” Kelder demanded.

“I don’t know,” she said defensively. “I haven’t kept track.”

Kelder found himself momentarily baffled by this response. How could anyone not know something like that?

Irith stared at him in mild irritation. “Why are you asking so many questions? What difference does it make?”

“When were you born?” Kelder asked. “What year?”

“Oh, well, if you put it like that,” Irith said, “I was born in 4978.”

“That’s more than two hundred years ago!” Kelder said, shocked.

“Yes, I guess it is,” Irith admitted.

“So you’re more than two hundred years old?” Asha asked, fascinated.

“No,” Irith insisted, “I’m fifteen! I’ve been fifteen for two hundred years, and I’ll always be fifteen!”

“Always?” Kelder asked.

Irith nodded. “It’s part of the spell,” she said.

Asha and Kelder exchanged glances. “So you are under a spell?” Asha asked.

“No, not like that,” Irith said.

Kelder asked, “Then like what? What spell are you talking about?”

“Well, the one that made me what I am, of course,” Irith said. “The one that made me a shapeshifter and everything.”

Just then the young man in the apron returned with their drinks; they accepted them, and waited until the young man had departed again.

Kelder sipped his ale, then turned back to Irith. “I think,” he said, “that you’re going to have to tell us all about it.”

Irith looked at him, at the unsmiling expression on his face, and then down at Asha, sitting beside him, her own little mouth set firmly.

Irith sighed.

“Oh, all right,” she said, “I’ll tell you the whole story.” She shifted on the bench, and then remarked by way of preamble, “You know, you two aren’t being any fun at all!”

The others just sat, and Irith began. “It’s called Javan’s Second Augmentation of Magical Memory,” she said. “The spell, I mean.”

“Tell us about it,” Kelder said.

“How did you learn it?” Asha asked. “Were you a magician?”

Irith frowned. “I guess I’d better start all the way back at the beginning,” she said.

She took a deep breath and began, “I was born in the Third Military District of Old Ethshar, which was already being called Dria — it was run by someone we called a Colonel, but he declared himself king when I was five. It was a lot bigger then than Dria is now — the Colonel ruled everything as far east as Thuth.”

She saw the rather blank expressions on both Kelder’s and Asha’s faces, and explained, “That’s all on the eastern plains, between the mountains and the desert — south of here.”

“But that’s not Ethshar,” Asha protested, “Ethshar’s way off to the west.”

“That’s the new Ethshar,” Irith said. “The Hegemony of Ethshar, it’s called. That was originally all conquered territory, and Old Ethshar was where the Small Kingdoms are now. It sort of fell apart, though.”

“Go on,” Kelder said.

“Well, anyway,” Irith said, “I grew up in Dria, and it was still part of Old Ethshar, sort of, but only because of the Great War. You know about that, right? How we were all fighting against the Northern Empire? And they had demons and sorcerers fighting for them?”

Kelder said, “We know about the War.”

“Well, because we were all scared of the Northerners, none of the Small Kingdoms fought each other much, and a lot of people just kept breaking off little pieces and setting up their own kingdoms, and nobody could do anything about it because we couldn’t afford to fight amongst ourselves, you see? But it made it harder and harder for the four generals to raise armies and protect us. So the war had been going on for hundreds of years, maybe a thousand years, but it was beginning to look like we might lose, or at least that’s what my parents thought. The news from the generals was good, mostly — General Gor was doing well in the west, and General Anaran was raiding the Empire’s borders, and everything — but Old Ethshar was coming apart.”

“What does this have to do with your spells?” Kelder asked.

“I’m getting to that!” Irith glared at him.

“Get to it, then!”

She glowered for a moment longer, then continued, “So everybody was very worried when I was growing up, and I heard a lot of stories about how terrible the Northerners were, and my parents were always talking about how everybody had to do everything they could for the war effort, and the king was always issuing proclamations about how Dria would fight to the last inch of ground and the last drop of blood, and all this stuff, and it was all exciting, and really scary, and I think it was a pretty bad way to grow up, but I didn’t have any choice, you know? So I was scared all the time, but I wanted to do my part, so I went and got tested at Dria Castle when I turned twelve, and they said I would make a good wizard, and the war effort always needed good wizards — we had much better wizards and theurgists than the Northerners did, which is why they didn’t win, even though they had much better sorcerers and demonologists.”

Kelder, seeing that this might actually lead somewhere, nodded encouragingly.

“So they signed me up as apprentice to a wizard who had retired from combat duty to train new wizards,” Irith went on. “Not in Dria Castle, up in the hills to the west. And he was a nice enough master, I guess, but he was older than anything, hundreds of years old, and he’d never married or had any kids or anything, so even though he knew just about all the wizardry there was, he wasn’t very easy to get along with, and he didn’t understand anything about what it was like for me, being a girl growing up like that.”

Kelder made a vaguely sympathetic noise.

“And I never really wanted to be a wizard anyway, and old Kalirin wanted to send me out to General Terrek on combat duty when I’d finished my apprenticeship, and he talked about my maybe doing research, but I knew that research wizards all get killed — I mean, they’re lucky if they last a month! And I hated it, all that fussing around with weird, icky stuff like lizard brains and spider guts and teardrops from unborn babies, and I mean, yuck! Who wants to be a wizard?”

Asha started to say something, and Irith cut her off. “Oh, all right, so it’s really great when a spell works the way it’s supposed to and everything, but there’s all that preparation and set-up and ritual first, and everything has to be just perfect — it isn’t all fun, you know. And they wanted me to learn all these awful spells for fighting with, that weren’t going to be any use for anything else, like blowing people into bits, and they didn’t care about any of the good stuff, like flying or shape-changing or anything. So I hated it. And by the time I was fifteen and was getting the hang of it all, the war was going badly in the east, and General Terrek was falling back, and how was I supposed to know he was luring the northern army into a trap? I thought we were going to lose the war, and the Northerners were going to come in and rape everybody and then kill us all, or torture us forever, or something. So one day when he was out somewhere I borrowed Kalirin’s book of spells and looked through it for some way to get myself out of it all, and I found Javan’s Second Augmentation.”

“Kalirin was your master?” Kelder asked.

“That’s right,” Irith agreed, “Kalirin the Clever. He’d been training wizards forever, practically — I must have been about his two hundredth apprentice.”

Kelder nodded. “So what is Javan’s Second Augmentation of whatever it is?”

“Well,” Irith said, “do you know anything about wizardry?”

Kelder considered for a second or two, then admitted, “Not really.”

“All right, it’s like this,” she explained. “Wizardry, as near as anybody can figure out, works by tapping into the chaos that reality is made out of — and if you don’t understand that that’s fine, because I don’t either, that’s just what Kalirin told me. It does this by taking magically-charged symbols — stuff like dragon’s blood or mashed spider legs — and ritually combining them in patterns that break through into that chaos. Or at least, that’s what the wizards think they’re doing, but nobody really knows for sure, they just know that if you do this and this and this, then that’ll happen. If you put a pinch of brimstone on the point of your... um, on your dagger and fling it in the air while you say the right magic word, it’ll start a fire — but nobody really knows why it does that, and why it doesn’t work if you try it with, say, phosphorus — I mean, phosphorus burns better than brimstone, so it ought to work, right? But it doesn’t. And it has to be a dagger that’s enchanted a particular way, too.”

Kelder nodded.

“And some of the spells take hours to do, or even days,” Irith said. “And some of the ingredients are a real nuisance to get hold of, you know? So it’s just not very convenient, being a wizard. It’s not like theurgy, where you can just call on a god and ask for a favor, or warlockry, where I don’t know what they do but it seems to work right away without any spells or equipment or anything.”

“So...” Kelder prompted.

“So,” Irith said, “this wizard Javan, who was some kind of genius or something, started looking for ways to get rid of all the rituals and magic words and rare ingredients and things. He wanted to find some way to get right at that chaos or whatever it is without all the in-between stuff. And he figured that if the ingredients are just symbols for something in the underlying chaos, then why can’t we use symbols of symbols? The way we use words as symbols, maybe. And he found a way he could sort of do this, sort of. He found a way to put spells right into a wizard’s brain, or his soul, or somewhere. He still had to do the whole ritual and everything, but he didn’t have to do it all just when he wanted the spell to work, he could do it in advance, and sort of store the spell in his head, ready to go. I mean, he could take some petrifaction spell or something that would take two days to perform, and he would run through the whole two-day ritual, and then his own little spell with it, and that would put the whole thing in his head, and then he could carry it there as long as he wanted, and then when he saw the person he wanted to petrify, he could just point and say a word, and that whole big fancy two-day spell would come pouring out of his head and down his arm, and bang! The person would be turned to stone.” Irith paused. “I think witchcraft works sort of like that, too,” she said, “but I’m not sure.”

Kelder nodded; Asha looked slightly confused. “But then, if wizards can carry spells around like that, why...” she began.

Kelder hushed her. “Irith will explain.”

“Right,” Irith agreed, “I will. So, Javan came up with this, and he called it Javan’s Augmentation of Magical Memory, Javan’s First Augmentation of Magical Memory — because you carry the spells in your head like memories, you see? Anyway, it’s a pretty good spell, it’s hard to do but it’s useful, and it’s still around, but not all that many wizards know it, because it is hard to do, and besides, there are some problems with it.”

“Like what?” Asha asked.

“Like, you can only do maybe three spells with it, four if they’re simple ones, maybe only two if they’re big, complicated ones. You can store them away in your head — but while any of them are still in there, you can’t do any other magic. And sometimes they go bad while they’re stored, and they don’t work right when you try them. And each one is only good once — use it, and it’s gone. So if you did a petrifaction spell, and the person you want to use it on has a couple of friends with him with swords, you could be in big trouble, because it’ll only work once. Oh, and there’s no way to get the spells out without using them, so if you store up a curse, and then your victim dies before you use it, you need to find someone else to put the curse on, or it’ll stay in your head forever and you won’t be able to do any other magic at all until you get it out. So it’s not all that useful a spell.”

Asha nodded.

“So that’s the First Augmentation,” Kelder said. “What’s the second one?”

“I’m getting to that,” Irith said. “So Javan had this spell, but it wasn’t everything he wanted, right? I mean, you could only carry three spells and they didn’t always work right, and it was a hard spell to perform in the first place. So he tried to come up with an improvement on it.”

“The Second Augmentation,” Kelder suggested.

“That’s right,” Irith agreed. “Except it wasn’t exactly an improvement after all, it’s just different. It lets you carry about a dozen spells, if you do it right, and you can use each one over and over, as many times as you like — but they never come out. And you can’t learn any more magic, ever.”

Kelder blinked. He thought that over.

“And there isn’t any counter-spell, at least not that anyone’s ever found. Which is why there wasn’t any Third Augmentation — because Javan tried out the spell, and loaded a dozen spells into his head, or maybe a dozen anyway, and from then on he could use them all as easily as snapping his fingers, but he could never get them out, and he couldn’t do any other magic, ever, and no other wizardry would even work on him, he was so charged full of magic, and since he hadn’t used any youth spells or immortality spells or anything in his experiment, that was the end of him — he lived about another thirty years, I guess, and he could do those ten or twelve spells all he wanted, but he wasn’t any use for anything else.” She grimaced. “Anyway, he’d written the whole thing down, so anyone who wanted — I mean, any wizard who could work high-order magic, because it’s not an easy spell — anyway, anyone who wanted to could see how the spell was done, but nobody ever tried it again.” She took a deep breath.

“Except me,” she said.