Schooled in Magic (16 page)

“Good question,” Lombardi said. “I’ll let you know if we ever find out the answer.”

Emily opened her mouth, but then realized that it might not be a wise subject to discuss, at least not yet. Instead, she considered what she’d just been told. She’d wondered why Alassa and others like her were allowed to bully at will, but now it seemed that there
were
limits, ones harshly enforced by the staff. No
permanent
harm, the Grandmaster had stipulated. As a way to encourage learning among students, it was hard to see how it could be beaten.

But Alassa had a gang of cronies...how could one magician beat them all?

Through knowledge
, she thought, and looked back at the professor.

“The final section of this spell is the endpoint,” Lombardi concluded. “It locks the spell structure firmly in place, preventing it from mutating out of control and becoming something very different from what you might have intended. Spells can shift very rapidly when
mana
is pouring through them, even if you set the variables with extreme care.
This
spell might well start to generate heat if it was allowed to mutate, or interact with other spells in the general area. Unlike the startpoint, the endpoint does nothing on its own, so don’t forget to place it at the end of any spell, even if you don’t intend to charge it with
mana
. Accidents happen, particularly when young magicians are involved.”

He paused, significantly. “Did you understand all that?”

Emily hesitated, and then nodded slowly. A computer geek would probably become the most powerful–or at least capable–magician in existence, if he were transported from Earth to her new home, but she knew enough to at least concentrate on the basic principles. Besides, Alassa would want revenge for Emily’s trick in the library. She’d just have to keep studying as hard as possible.

“Good,” Lombardi said. He grinned, evilly. “Because we’re now going to start practicing writing out spells.”

He opened a drawer and produced a sheet of parchments and an odd-looking pencil. It took Emily a moment to realize that it had been hand-carved, rather than looking like the mass-produced pencils she was used to from back home.

She took the strange pencil when it was passed to her and examined it thoughtfully. Judging from the marks, it had been sharpened with a knife rather than a pencil sharpener. Making a mental note to import proper pens and pencils if she ever managed to open up a permanent link to Earth, she took the parchment and wrote her name on the top of the page.

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.”

“H
E 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 nearly 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?”