Nightlord: Sunset (27 page)

Now, to expand upon a concept…

Suppose you need more room?  Imagine a door that leads to another, larger room.  Want to build a working model of a spell without actually making a rock explode or enchanting an entire sailing ship?  Add another room to the Headspace and put it together there.  Since it’s all happening in your mind, not in the real world, the power requirement is almost nonexistent, but you can see if your idea is likely to work or not.

Maybe it’s just a really advanced form of meditation, but I find it really handy.

Once that basic technique was down, we could go into a sort of mutual rapport in either his headspace or mine.  We built a “hallway” between the headspaces with doors at either end.  Jon doesn’t like unexpected visitors any more than I do, I think.  But by visiting in his headspace, he could whip out notes, show me things, and replay memories for me that would have taken hours or days just to explain.

It’s all happening at the speed of thought.  We were in his headspace for at least twelve hours—or so I thought.  When we came out into the “real” world again (the headspace
seems
as real as imagination can make it) I found it had been a little over an hour.

My education and training as a wizard seem to be proceeding at a headlong pace.  I get the feeling he’s in a hurry.

Let’s see, what else have I been learning?  Well, one of the high points:  How to not be noticed.

“No, you aren’t invisible!” Jon snapped, after I asked.  “That’s a lot harder because it involves fooling the eyes, not the head!  Eyes almost always see things as they are; it’s the head that doesn’t pay attention.  You’ll be seen, if you do it right.  You just won’t be
noticed
.  It’s bloody useful.”

“I’m not getting it,” I admitted.

Jon seemed disgusted.  “What color are the baron’s eyes?”

I blinked.  “Uh.  I don’t know.”

“You fought with the man for half an hour, sometimes so close you could have kissed him when your guards locked.  You looked him square in the face how many times?  And you don’t know what color his eyes are?”

“Well, no.”

Jon nodded.  “The same thing happens here.  You stop being noticed.  People have more important things to think about, like their drink, or what the wife will say when they get home, or whether or not the sergeant knows about that privy break.”

“So I can’t be noticed?”

Jon slapped a bony hand down on the table, making the candle jump.  “No!  You do something stupid and draw attention to yourself and people will notice.  If you don’t, you’re just another face—if they remember anything about you at all.  A sentry won’t let you through; he’ll demand your papers.  A guard won’t let you rob the merchant.  A watchman will chase you if he sees you knife someone.  People will laugh at you if you take off all your clothes and dance in the street.  But if you
are
just a face in the crowd, then no one will notice or remember you.”

“If I do okay at blending in, then I just sort of fade away?”

“It can learn!” he exclaimed.  “Exactly!”

“Sounds useful.”

“It is.”

I’m not really all that pleased at projecting a field to influence people’s minds, but it’s a lot better than reaching into someone’s brain and eating part of it.  I can live with whispering “don’t notice me” instead.

One of the other things he explained was how any magic-worker works his magic.

“If you’re going to make magic do something, you have to tell it what you want,” he said.  “You can just picture your result and muscle it, or you can see
how
you want your result and make your life easier.”

“So, if I just want it to rain, I can wish real hard?”

“You can, if you’re stupid,” he answered.  My ears burned and my face grew warm as he continued, “You need to watch clouds for a while and ask them to come over, clump together, and then take a big leak all over the area.”

“Um.  Right.  So the more I know about how a thing works, the better?”

“At last, something correct!  Yes.  And you need the ability to make vivid mental pictures—which you must have, or you wouldn’t be
here
.  I catch flying lines of color and make them spin around for spells; you’ll see magic in your own way and develop your own techniques to use it.  How do you see magic?”

“Well, I don’t see it so much as I feel it, usually.”

Jon threw his hands into the air.  “By all the gods!  I’m glad you arrived early!”

That was a long, long bout in the headspace.  A wizard’s eyes are sensitive to magic—or the wizard is, anyway.  A wizard has to be in order to work with the forces involved.  Jon spent a lot of time on sensitizing me to the ebb and flow of magical force.  By the time he was done, I could
see
magic as easily as I could see the life in a beating heart.  That wasn’t entirely a good thing, especially at night; the two could blanket each other if I didn’t look carefully.  Strong magic could hide life-auras, and vice versa.

He also went over Calling.  Apparently, when a wizard knows it’s time for him to go—or, at least, suspects it—he casts a spell called the Calling.  Like calls to like, and a wizard much like himself will find events are conspiring to move another wizard to him.  One can put a delicate spin on the Calling, too, in order to get someone not quite like oneself, or who tends toward certain qualities.  But it’s draining, ongoing, and pretty much all a wizard can do magically until he succeeds or gives it up.

As for how a wizard knows he’s going to need a replacement…

Jon showed me the ropes.

Well, the Ribbon.

Imagine standing on a ribbon.  It’s a couple of feet wide, and seems to be a sort of polychrome, shifting and changing in color as you watch.  It’s rolling by under you, constantly, out of a formless fog ahead.  The fog is silvery-grey and seems to flow into threads of different colors, which twist and braid themselves, smoke-like, into solidity just under you.  Behind you, the ribbon stretches as far as you can see, crystal-clear and fixed.  Ahead, it’s being woven out of the raw stuff of chaos.

Normally, a wizard looks ahead as far as he can; that may be an hour, a day, or a week—maybe even a month or a year, if his life is very stable and quiet, very predictable and unchanging.  And, sometimes, the ribbon seems to narrow a lot, a sort of pinch where everything all comes together in a pivotal moment; beyond that, things are
very
hazy, as it is a major, life-changing decision point.  The future
isn’t
, and there’s no way to tell what will come until that point is reached.

You can sometimes get a clue about the nature of the decision from the colors of the threads.  Oh, yes, you can see individual threads.  Some are finer than silk (and not major influences in your life) and some are thick as yarn (for big things).  They all vary in color, too, and that can give you some idea of what they are, along with how they twine with other things.  And when they started, of course.

My ribbon stretched back about a day.  Behind it, there was a break.  Then another short stretch of ribbon. Then a break.  Then another short stretch… until you went back a long way and found an unbroken line of ribbon.  Ahead, my ribbon kept right on going, twisting, braiding, and weaving until it came to a definite end.

Sometimes, dying at sunset and coming alive again in the morning is a real nuisance.  Obviously, my ability to see my own personal future was sharply limited.

The other problem was it took a while to get into a state where one could look at one’s life-ribbon.  Jon managed it in about an hour, and it took me about as long even with his help.  It was also tiring.  Not exactly something one can do in the middle of a fight to determine whether or not sticking around is likely to be comparatively safe or not.  It’s not even good for deciding whether or not to stick around for an upcoming siege; that would just be a pivotal point.  I don’t see the Ribbon as being all that useful.

Oh, and even though Jon was helping, he saw
his
ribbon.  I saw mine.  A wizard never gets to see anybody else’s ribbon, except for the thread of his own ribbon that marks another’s influence on his life.  If it stops, for example, it only means they aren’t an influence anymore; it doesn’t mean they’re dead.

Shada tells me the
gata
fortune-tellers do much the same thing, when they are actually trying.  Their technique is different, though.  It isn’t something you can learn; you have to be born with the Sight, as they put it.  If you have it, you can get better at it; if you don’t have it, no amount of trying will help.  For some reason, they can see someone else’s Ribbon—the ones that aren’t frauds, anyway.

I tried to look at my ribbon again that night, after the sun was down.  It also only works for people who are alive.  No shadow ribbons for us dead people.

Jon also tried to teach me the rudiments of divination by crystal ball—seeing bits of the future in the glass.  Usually, they are dim, fleeting, and seldom very revealing, but they do provide clues.  What you see
will
come to pass.  Of course, if you see yourself bleeding from the neck, that may mean you cut yourself shaving—or that someone cut your throat.  Sometimes it’s hard to tell through the murk.  The future is never too clear.

Sadly, Jon was disappointed in me as a diviner.  I just don’t get it.  It’s the
future
.  There’s no telling what’s going to happen.  Probabilities, perhaps, but the future isn’t fixed.  At least, that’s how I feel about it, which Jon says is my chief difficulty.  If I had more faith in Fate, I might do better.  I did just fine at seeing other places
now
, using the crystal ball like a television screen; but the future is almost a closed door to me.

Various other forms of divination—bibliomancy, pyromancy, tea leaves, water and bones, runestones, horoscopes—all failures.  Jon despairs of ever teaching me to read the future.  I
stink
at it.

Shada, meanwhile, made herself at home in the baron’s manor.  The Court Wizard to the baron has three main rooms all to himself: a laboratory/library, a living area, and a bedchamber.  No private bath, though there were washbasins aplenty and both servants and slaves to haul water. 

I was right about my early evaluation of slaves; they are generally the province of the wealthy because they are expensive, especially skilled ones.  Plus, unlike servants, the owner has to be able to afford feeding and housing for the slaves.  But there are also various degrees of slavery.  There is serfdom—a small step up—and indentured servitude, as well as the basic chains-and-whip property.

Shada managed to make herself comfortable in what were going to be our quarters.  Which meant, yes, she cleaned.  Or supervised cleaning, anyway;
gata
wagons aren’t as drafty and dusty inside as you might think.

I wonder if I can get a shower rigged up in my quarters?  I’ll have to look into it later.

Shada apparently spent a lot of time with her
gata
seer/sorceress/wizard/wise woman.  None of the chalked diagrams on the floor of the workroom were touched.  Heck, she barely touched the room at all, aside from closing some dusty books and putting them on shelves.

Which brings me to another issue I’d been concerned about.

I had learned to speak the language by—apparently—absorbing a lot of it during feeding; literacy, however, was something that made me nervous.  The books I’d looked over in what I think of as the “Gate Room” in Telen hadn’t been even remotely familiar or legible to me.  I don’t like the idea of having to learn a whole new alphabet, spelling, and so on.  It took me a long time to get this proficient with English!  That was my main stumbling block in college—learning another language was required for a degree.  It took me four years to finally get enough successful credit hours in German.

I needn’t have worried.  I looked at pages and had to think a bit, but I could puzzle it out.  After being told “Read that,” by Jon a couple of times, I managed to stop moving my lips, too.

Do you have any idea how much of a relief it is to realize that you can
read?
  I don’t think most people really ever think about it.  To not be able to read is almost like being blind.  It closes off not just a whole world of possibilities, but several worlds of possibility, impossibility, fantasy, and fiction.

I’d sooner part with an eyeball than not be able to read.

The baron is a man of harsh punishments when it comes to breaking the law.  Well, at least to my “civilized” standards.  Losing a hand strikes me as being a bit on the harsh side for petty theft.  Then again, there isn’t a lot of petty theft in this barony; losing a hand
is
a pretty good deterrent.  Still, there are murderers and thieves, cutthroats and cutpurses, if you will.  I find the city’s watchmen are pretty decent at their job, if not quite the forensic and detective specialists I’m used to.

That’s okay.  It isn’t just the Shadow who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men.  I went hunting for meals and tried to do my job as a good bloodsucking fiend of the night.