Salamander
    
    To the late Patri Pugliese
    
    My consultant on cleverness and much else.
    
     
    
    He relaxed, closed his eyes, let his mind wander out. 
Behind him the dying embers of his fireplace, beyond it the 
fires in neighboring houses. At his right, just the other 
side of the wall, the little furnace, at its heart a single, 
impossibly brilliant, point of light. He pulled shadow over 
it until it vanished.
    
    Farther out, the near edge of the vast sphere of woven 
fire that held the College, half its height above ground, 
half below. He melted into it, fitting himself to the 
dancing flames, through.
    
    A classroom, at its head a magister, young for his 
robes.
    
    _
    
     
    
    Magister Coelus scanned faces as he always did, at the 
start, searching for gold. Not for power so much as 
perception, control.  Intelligence.  The stragglers took 
their seats.  A boy at the back caught his attention, his 
glow an odd pattern of woven flame.  It seemed brighter, 
more intense than the others.  Power certainly.  And a lot 
of it.  The boy looked up at the magister; the light 
vanished.  Not a boy but a girl, with a shy face neither 
pretty nor ugly.
    
    He wondered if she had blocked him out of training or 
talent. No girl student in the four years since he and 
Maridon had persuaded the College of modern scholarship's 
relevance to their admission policy had ever shown more than 
average ability. If the girl turned out to be not merely a 
fire mage but a prodigy as well, it would shake up the 
greybeards_and a good thing too.
    
    Seated now, the students watched him intently; time to 
begin. 
    
    "Let us start by listing that which everyone knows about 
magery.
    
    "Mages have magic; common folk do not.
    
    "What makes a truly great mage is power, the ability to 
set a forest on fire or freeze a lake.
    
    "Mages train, as apprentices with one master or students 
with many, in order to learn to increase their power.
    
    "The power of mages comes from the 
elementals_salamanders for fire, sylphs for air, and the 
rest.  Elementals know mages by their names.  Hence, giving 
a child the name of a past mage gives him easier access to 
that mage's elemental.
    
    "Every one of the facts I have just listed is false. The 
first step to wisdom is not learning but unlearning."
    
    He looked up from his notes into silence, held it for a 
long moment, continued.
    
    "First, and most important, magic is not limited to 
mages. Human beings without magic, if they exist, are far 
rarer than humans beings with magic. Modern research 
suggests that magic is not even limited to human beings. 
Many, perhaps all, living creatures have some portion of 
magic used in some way.
    
    "All of you know people who are not mages but use magic. 
The cook at the inn, whose food tastes better than anyone 
else's. The lucky hunter. The farmer with a green thumb. It 
once was thought that the success of ordinary people in 
ordinary tasks depended only on mundane skills. But this is 
not so, as scholars have now proved beyond dispute. Nearly 
everyone has magic and very nearly everyone uses it, mostly 
as an additional aid in their ordinary business."
    
    If possible, the room became more silent still. Coelus 
looked up at faces blank, some obviously shocked.
    
    "This has been suspected for a long time and was proved 
more than a decade ago. It is not a secret of mages. Mages 
have little need to keep secrets, considering how unwilling 
people are to believe the truth when it is told to them.
    
    "Some of you are now wondering why you are here. If your 
parents' laundry maid_the one who always gets the clothes to 
come out brighter than anyone else_would do as well, why not 
send her? Why are you more suited to be mages than she is?"
    
    Again he stopped, to let them think, and tension build.
    
    "The answer is not that you have magic and she does not, 
but that you have more than she_enough to be used for more 
than washing shirts. That is half the difference between 
mages and other folk, the half that got you sent here. The 
other half, how to use that power, is what you are here to 
learn.
    
    "You will start learning it very soon, but you will have 
more to unlearn. I have just told you that one part of what 
makes a mage is having more power. How, then, is the power 
of great mages false?
    
    "Even the greatest mages have very little power. You 
have all heard stories of how a fire mage waved his hand and 
set a forest ablaze. Some may be excellent stories_but none 
of them are true. If a fire mage wants to set a forest 
ablaze, he must do it the same way anyone else does_with a 
lot of kindling. Durilil, our Founder, one of the most 
powerful fire mages that ever lived, is reliably reported to 
have been able to set a hearth fire of plain logs ablaze. A 
forest holds many more logs than a hearth.
    
    "What makes a great mage is not his power, but the skill 
with which he uses it. Consider a healer_yes, within these 
walls, healers are mages. No mage has enough power to go 
through the whole body of a patient and set everything 
aright, at least not if the patient is anything bigger than 
a mouse. What a skilled healer does is to find the one 
crucial fault, and heal that. Then let the rest fall into 
place by its own nature. The more skill a mage has, the less 
power he uses_or needs_to accomplish his task. That is what 
you are here to learn.
    
    "We cannot teach you to increase your power. You are 
here to increase your skill. We can increase your power no 
more than we can teach you to increase your height. It is 
possible, although difficult and dangerous, to obtain the 
use of more power by pooling with another mage. There are 
also potions to let you draw down your power today at a cost 
tomorrow, although I do not advise you to use them. The pool 
itself we cannot increase."
    
    Coelus fell silent, and looked out over his audience. To 
start backwards, with all they knew that wasn't true, always 
worked. Everyone in the class was now wide awake and 
watching him. Now it was their turn. "Questions?"
    
    A long silence before a hand went up. "How can people 
use the elements for magic in daily life? Cooking has 
something to do with fire and farming with earth, but 
hunting? What is the element for a tailor?"
    
    "There is no element for a tailor or a hunter. There is 
no element for cooking, as far as I know, and I have my 
doubts that a good farmer is simply an untrained earth mage. 
Nor is there an element for healing.  Yet I have told you 
that a healer is a sort of mage. There is no element for 
weaving.  Yet the sphere of woven fire that holds this 
College safe from the world, and the world safe from the 
College, was the work of two mages, and only one was a fire 
mage.
    
    "The belief that all magic is tied to one of the four 
elements is both true and false. All magic is indeed earth, 
air, fire and water, in many combinations. But all magic can 
equally well be seen as hot, cold, wet and dry, or woven, 
shaped, refined and tempered. Hot magic may be combined of 
air and fire, but equally fire magic of hot and dry."
    
    The students looked puzzled at the paradox, the central 
paradox of magical theory_except for the girl in back, who 
watched only with careful attentiveness. Coelus wondered if 
she had failed to follow_which would be a pity_or if she 
already knew. Some students came to the College already 
apprenticed and at least a few witches were technically 
competent in magery. If most were not, that was in part the 
fault of the College. If the girl had not come with an 
adequate understanding, at least she could leave with one.
    
    "Explaining how this can be and the simpler implications 
will take me most of two months, starting here first period 
tomorrow. For now, the best I can offer is metaphor."
    
    He turned to the broad slate that occupied most of the 
front wall of the lecture hall, chalk in hand. "Imagine this 
slate is a map. A is where you are starting. B is where you 
want to go to."
    
    He drew an arrow pointing up, under it an N for north, a 
rough distance scale in miles, turned back to the class. 
"How do you get there?"
    
    The same student who had asked the question raised his 
hand; Coelus nodded to him to speak.
    
    "Go about six miles east, then two north."
    
    "Yes. Can someone give me another answer?"
    
    No one spoke. Coelus looked at the girl in back; in a 
moment she raised her hand, a bit reluctantly.  "A little 
less than six miles North-east, almost three miles south-
east."
    
    "Yes."
    
    He turned back to the board, drew in her answer as two 
arrows, turned back to the class. "Which is true? Is point B 
east and north from point A?"
    
    He held their eyes for a moment, turned back to the 
board, waved his hand_what they would expect of a mage. The 
horizontal grid, white on the black slate, appeared 
suddenly. "Or is it north-east and south-east from point A?"
    
    He stepped to the slate, caught the grid at its bottom 
edge and swung it up_it pivoted on the lower left corner 
until its lines lay along what had been the diagonal. "Class 
dismissed."
    
    * * *
    
    "How does the new class look?"
    
    Maridon looked up from the papers. "Forty-nine new 
students, six women. Mostly children of minor nobles, 
tradesmen, small landowners, but there are two farmers' sons 
Dag searched out and sent here. Three are the children of 
mages, so probably half-trained or half mistrained already. 
Also the daughter of Duke Morgen, who may be a problem. Less 
power than most, but it might be prudent not to say so."
    
    Coelus shook his head. "And then when she can't do 
things_ . I suppose there's the usual nonsense with names?"
    
    Maridon nodded. "At least there's only one each of 
Durilil, Georgias, and Helmin. Remember year before last? 
Three Durilils and two Gilbers. Good thing most people don't 
plan on their children being mages, or we would be down to 
four or five names for the whole class. Far as I can see 
there's no truth to it_damn superstition."
    
    "No truth at all. I went through the school records for 
the past twenty years and just finished up last week. A kid 
named Durilil is no more likely to end up a fire mage, or 
Gilber earth, than anyone else. And it's getting worse. Mage 
names are much more common than they were twenty years ago. 
Why won't people believe us when we tell them it doesn't 
work?"
    
    Maridon contemplated, not for the first time, the limits 
of his colleague's formidable intelligence. He might be the 
best theorist in the college, but understanding people was 
another matter. "They don't believe us because they think we 
are trying to keep down the competition. Too many talented 
mages and what would become of us?"
    
    "There can't be. Just think of all we could do if there 
were five or ten times as many mages. We could put out 
forest fires before they spread, maybe halt plagues. That's 
why _"
    
    "That's why you talked Dag into spending his free year 
seeking out talent in unexpected places. We may know that, 
but who else does? People believe what they want to believe.
    
    "Oh well. Perhaps in fifty years half the newborn boys 
in the kingdom will be named Coelus!"
    
    Coelus shook his head. "Not even one in a thousand. If I 
am very lucky, fifty years from now a handful in the College 
will remember my work. Nobody else. Theory doesn't impress 
ordinary people. They want results, nice showy results. If 
Durilil had come back with the Salamander on a chain instead 
of never coming back at all, half the class would be named 
after him, not just one or two.
    
    "Let me have a look at the admission papers."
    
    The two fell silent for a few minutes while Coelus 
leafed through the stack. At last he looked back up. "That's 
very interesting."
    
    "What? I didn't see anything special about any of them."
    
    "That's what's interesting. According to Hal we have 
three or four moderately strong students_one of them named 
Helmin, and one a find of Dag's_plus a bunch with enough 
power to be worth training but not much more, and a few I'm 
not sure we should have taken. That's what he saw. But I was 
watching the class before my first lecture and it isn't what 
I saw."
    
    The other mage looked at him curiously, waited.
    
    "I'll leave you to see for yourself. Let me know when 
you've spotted him. Or not."
    
    Maridon noticed the suppressed smile_Coelus was not 
nearly as subtle as he thought he was_made his own 
deduction, said nothing.
    
    Chapter 1  
    
    The lecturer droned to a halt, put the chalk down, and 
turned to the class. "I hope that is clear. If not, make 
sure it is by tomorrow; some of this will be used in what we 
do then. If your own notes are not sufficient, the library 
has a list of written texts that cover the same material."
    
    He looked them over a moment and then, satisfied, turned 
and left the room.
    
    Mari looked down at her tablets, pale yellow wax in 
ebony, the outside panels inlaid with a pattern in gold 
wire. Other students were jotting final notes in theirs, so 
she used her stylus to add, in her untidy script, two more 
notes on wedding garb for a (hypothetical) future wedding.
    
    Her notes were not likely to make the lecture any more 
understandable, nor, she suspected, would the texts in the 
library. The one she had tried to read so far might have 
been written in archaic Dorayan, for all the sense she could 
make of it. What she needed was a helpful human being to 
explain things for her.
    
    One or two of the younger magisters might be 
possibilities, but probably not this year; that could wait 
until her first individual tutorial. With ten men to every 
woman, not to mention her natural advantages, getting one of 
the male students to help her would be easy enough. But on 
the whole she preferred to keep her alternatives open. Might 
as well keep them all hoping.
    
    The answer was obvious and sitting two chairs away. The 
girl had no clothes sense and no particular looks, but she 
seemed pleasant enough if a little shy, and she obviously 
understood the lecture better than anyone else in the room. 
She had been transparently puzzled when the other 
students_including, once, Mari_were unable to answer the 
magister's questions. She answered those put to her 
immediately, clearly, and apparently correctly. By the 
second half of the class the lecturer had fallen into a 
pattern of putting a question to some other student and 
then, lacking a satisfactory response, asking Ellen.
    
    There was a clatter and rumble of scraping as the 
students got up from their chairs. Mari decided to approach 
the girl directly. She made her way to the back of the room 
against the exiting flow of pupils where Ellen was still 
putting away her things. "You seemed to understand all of 
that much better than I did; would you be willing to join me 
at lunch and try to explain it?"
    
    Ellen looked up at Mari, smiled. "Of course. At the noon 
bell?"
    
    Mari decided not to suggest the cookshop to meet. The 
other girl was wearing no jewelry and her clothes gave no 
sign of rank or wealth. If she was too poor to want to buy 
lunch when it was free in the college refectory the 
suggestion would embarrass her; offering to buy it for her 
might make matters worse. In the setting of the College the 
girl was her equal_at least her equal_and it was up to Mari 
to remember that. "At the noon bell then," Mari said.
    
    * * *
    
    Mari waited until the two were seated at one of the 
smaller tables and Ellen had cut a slice from her sausage 
before putting her first question. "Are we training to be 
witches or mages? I can't tell."
    
    Ellen considered for a moment. "We are training to use 
magic. Women who use magic are commonly called witches. 
Several of the magisters here think they ought to be called 
mages, that what they do is no different from what men who 
use magic do."
    
    "Women do different sorts of magic. Everyone knows that. 
Weaving magic and healing magic and things like that. Men 
are fire mages and earth mages and _ ."
    
    "Everyone knows it. But it isn't true. At least, not 
completely true."
    
    "How both true and not true? I don't understand."
    
    "That was part of what Magister Bertram was trying to 
explain.  Most weaving mages are women and most fire mages 
are men, but that doesn't mean a man can't have a talent for 
weaving or a woman for fire." Ellen looked around the 
refectory. It was getting crowded, but so far nobody had 
joined them at their table. "Which are taller, men or 
women?"
    
    "Men, of course. Jon over there is taller than I am, and 
even Edwin is taller than you are."
    
    "But you are taller than Edwin. So men are not taller 
than women. Not always."
    
    "And men are better at fire magic, but not always?"
    
    Ellen nodded.
    
    "Well, of course lots of women are taller than short 
men. But I have never heard of a woman who was a fire mage. 
Not one."
    
    Ellen thought a moment before answering. "Mages have to 
be trained. At best, an untrained mage cannot do much with 
his power. At worst, an untrained fire mage either kills 
himself by accident_that's what usually happens_or burns 
down a house or barn and kills someone else, and then, very 
likely, someone kills him. A boy who starts showing the 
talent is likely to be recognized before he does any serious 
damage and, with luck, sent for training. A girl _ . 
Everyone knows girls can't be fire mages."
    
    "That's scary. But if women are hardly ever fire mages, 
and the ones that do get killed, how do Coelus and Bertram 
know witches can do fire magic? How do you know?"
    
    "I think Coelus figured it out from basic magical 
theory, but I'm not sure."  Ellen gave the other girl a 
long, considering look. "How good are you at keeping 
secrets?"
    
    "Quite. My brother tells me things. I never tell our 
parents." She stopped.
    
    "Can you keep a secret for me too?"
    
    Mari nodded.
    
    Ellen turned in her seat, holding her hand, palm up, 
where her body blocked it from the rest of the room. For a 
moment her hand cupped a flame. "That's how I know."
    
    Mari's eyes widened. She looked back at Ellen.
    
    "May I join your table, noble lady?"
    
    Both girls looked up. The speaker, a tall student, well 
dressed, was looking at Mari inquisitively. She nodded 
assent.
    
    "Joshua son of Maas at your service. How have you been 
enjoying your first week in this temple of wisdom?"
    
    "Everyone is very kind, but I find the wisdom somewhat 
opaque," Mari replied, cheerfully. "Ellen was just kindly 
explaining today's lecture to me."
    
    Joshua glanced at Ellen, then back to Mari. "I would be 
happy to provide any assistance you ladies may require. 
After a year and a few weeks I think I have most of it down 
and I'm looking forward to getting out, come spring. My 
father thinks a trained mage would be very useful in his 
business. What was it that was puzzling you?"
    
    Mari gave Ellen a rueful glance, turned back to Joshua. 
"I am still puzzled by Magister Coelus' explanation of how 
magic can be entirely elemental, entirely humeral, entirely 
natural and entirely combinatorial, all at the same time."
    
    "That I can explain. The elemental points are, of 
course, the elements: earth, air, fire and water. The 
natural points are the natures: hot, cold, dry, and wet. Hot 
is a mixture of fire and air, cold of earth and water, and 
so on."
    
    "But didn't he also say that fire was a mix of hot and 
dry? If hot is fire and air, and dry is ...," she looked at 
the others.
    
    "Fire and earth," Ellen responded. Joshua looked 
momentarily annoyed.
    
    "Fire and earth. That's right."
    
    Mari continued: "Then a mix of hot and dry ought to have 
fire and air and fire and earth. That's two fire and one 
each air and earth. So how can it be pure fire?"
    
    Joshua looked puzzled. "Say that again?"
    
    "A mix of hot and dry ought to have fire and air and 
fire and earth. That's two fire and one each air and earth. 
So how can it be pure fire?"
    
    He thought a moment before answering. "That does seem 
puzzling, but it must be true. I am afraid the explanation 
is a little complicated for students in their first year, 
but by the time you finish Magister Coelus's theory course 
next spring it should be clear enough. That's the bell for 
the fourth period; my tutor will be expecting me. I hope we 
can talk more later."
    
    He gave Mari a formal bow, nodded to Ellen, went out the 
door.
    
    Mari turned with an arched eyebrow back to Ellen. "Well, 
perhaps you understand it?"
    
    Ellen nodded. "But I don't think he does. Mixes are a 
loose way of putting it and misleading, for just the reason 
you saw. The superposition has phase as well as amplitude; 
the air and earth cancel when you put hot and dry together 
with the right phase to get back to fire. How much 
mathematics have you learned?"
    
    Mari looked at her helplessly. "When I add up numbers I 
can usually get the same answers twice running."
    
    "There is a class next semester that you could take to 
get the basics_the math, not the magic theory. Then the real 
math class next fall.  And then Magister Coelus' advanced 
theory class in the spring. He is supposed to be very good. 
Mother says he has been responsible for more progress in 
basic theory than anyone else in the past twenty years."
    
    "Your mother is a witch? Or a mage, I suppose I should 
say?"
    
    "Mother is a weaving mage, which, outside the College, 
is a witch. She finds theory fascinating. She taught me as 
much as she could and then sent me here to learn more. When 
I'm done I expect she'll want me to come back and teach it 
to her."
    
    "No wonder you know so much already. It would be a great 
favor to me if you would keep on explaining things to me. 
You are so much easier to understand than the magisters."
     
    "Of course." Ellen looked down, back up, and smiled. 
"Mother says teaching is the best way of learning things, so 
it isn't really a favor at all. Besides _ I'm happy to be 
your friend.  But, I must go now to prepare for my next 
class."
    
    Mari watched her go. One problem solved. The next would 
be how to politely discourage Joshua. Not that there was 
anything wrong with rich merchants or their sons. But she 
did not think that was what her father was planning for her. 
And, in this case, hoped not. She wondered if the boy had 
actually forgotten that the schedule for all three 
years_with tutorials in the fifth and sixth periods, not the 
fourth_was posted on the corridor wall outside the 
refectory, or if he simply assumed she had not bothered to 
read it.
    
    
    
Chapter 2 
    
    "You are here to learn to make use of magery. To that 
lesson there are three parts.
    
    "The first part is to gain understanding of how magery 
works. This training you will receive from Magister Coelus, 
whose first lecture you had yesterday morning. I hope you 
are all continuing to ponder the wisdom it contained.
    
    "The second part is how to do magery, how to, with the 
power within you and through the knowledge of the names of 
things, using spells constructed by wise men of old, cause 
effects in the world. Before I teach you that, you must 
first learn from Magister Simon an understanding of names in 
the true speech, which is the language in which the world is 
told, the language in which spells are spoken. Or thought. 
Not in our common tongue.
    
    "The third part is how to use your power. That is our 
subject today.
    
    "A spell has a direct effect and an indirect effect. The 
direct effect is commonly called magic. It is what the spell 
does. The indirect effect is what you do with the spell. The 
direct effect is to set one stalk of straw alight. The 
indirect effect, of which the direct is the cause, is that 
stalk setting a field ablaze.
    
    "As you grow wiser you will see further, to effects of 
which the burning field is itself a cause, and beyond. To do 
magic is only the beginning. Beyond that you will be using 
wisdom, knowledge, in order, by the use of magic, to alter 
the world.
    
    "Magery is a tool. The first step to wisdom is to learn 
what sort of a tool it is."
    
    He stopped a moment, looked up at the faces, then down 
at his notes, and continued. "Magery is not a battering ram 
or a stroke of lightning; nobody ever smashed a castle wall 
with a spell, or split an oak tree."
    
    Magister Bertram lifted up his hand, turned it, and 
flexed its gnarled fingers. "Consider a hand. It cannot 
knock down a gate like a battering ram. It cannot split an 
oak in an instant like a stroke of lightning. But it is more 
useful than a battering ram or a lightning bolt, because it 
can do more and more useful things. If you exchanged your 
right hand for a battering ram and your left for a lightning 
bolt you would, no doubt, be a very impressive figure. But 
you would regret the change the first time you needed to eat 
dinner."
    
    He stopped, looked into the silence, and recalled 
hearing the same words, in the same lecture hall, when he 
was a student. He had thought it a striking figure of speech 
at the time.
    
    "Nobody can knock down a castle wall with his hand. But 
when walls come down, it is hands that do it. Hands build 
siege engines, dig mines, bribe traitors. The greatest hero 
cannot split an oak tree with a blow of his hand. But human 
hands split the oak to make the benches you sit on.
    
    "You have had hands your whole life long, so they no 
longer seem wonderful to you. But try to imagine what it 
would be like if you had to figure out for the first time 
how five fingers could bring down a tree, or dig a hole, or 
start a fire, or draw water from a well.
    
    "A mage must learn to use magic as a child might learn 
to use his hand."
    
    He again looked down at his notes, let silence build 
before continuing. "We start with a simple problem. The 
Forstings have seized Northpass castle and the king is 
sieging it to get it back. The Forsting defenders have sent 
a messenger off. He is several miles down the road, too far 
for pursuit to catch him. If he and his message get safe to 
the enemy army on the far side of the pass, they will come 
to the rescue of the defenders and the siege will fail. 
Perhaps the war will be lost.
    
    "You are a fire mage. You do not have a great deal of 
power_no mage does_and the greater the distance over which 
you must work the less the power you can apply. How might 
you stop the messenger? How use fire to keep the message 
from reaching its destination? "
    
    The lecture hall was silent as he looked out over the 
room. Eventually one of the students raised his hand. "Burn 
the messenger up?"
    
    The magister shook his head. One student who had not 
been listening. "That requires a great deal of fire, more 
than any mage has."
    
    "Burn just his head or his heart_that would be enough to 
kill him."
    
    "Better; if he were standing next to you and you were 
strong enough it might do. But if he were standing next to 
you there would be no need of magery. At a distance of some 
miles, no. You are trying to knock a castle wall down with 
your hand."
    
    Another student raised his hand. Magister Bertram 
recognized him, by his dress and rawboned height, as the 
farm boy Magister Dag had discovered and recommended to the 
college_one of the stronger mages among the new students, 
whatever his other limits.
    
    "Follow after the messenger, quick as you can. First 
night on the road, set fire to the hay in the stable where 
his horse is. Hay's dry, won't take much to kindle it."
    
    "Much better. But the messenger might buy another 
horse."
    
    The third hand raised was a tall girl, very well 
dressed. Also strikingly good looking.  "Eight miles past 
Northpass Keep the road forks at Fire Mountain. The main 
road goes on to Berio, which is where the enemy army 
probably is, or at least its commander. The other branch 
ends at the village of Efkic, fifteen miles away, where the 
old road to the pass was blocked by lava flows a century or 
so back. There are wooden sign posts at the fork with the 
names of the towns burned into them.
    
    "It should take the messenger at least an hour to reach 
the fork; that gives you plenty of time to burn a few extra 
lines, changing EFKIC into BERIO, and BERIO into BERTOL. 
Send a squad of cavalry to the fork to intercept the 
messenger when he finally discovers he has gone the wrong 
way and turns back."
    
    There was silence, half the class looking at the girl, 
half watching the magister for his response. He had to think 
a moment; it was not an answer he had heard before. "An 
adequate solution, provided that the wood of the sign is dry 
and the messenger does not know the road."
    
    The magister turned to the class. "Consider the lesson. 
There is no one problem you will face, and no one answer to 
be learned. It is up to the mage to find the best way of 
using his talent to achieve his goal. It does not take much 
to startle a horse. There might be a bend at some place in 
the road where a rider who loses control for a few seconds 
goes over the edge of a cliff. To a mage, knowledge is 
power. All knowledge."
    
    He hesitated a moment, then realized that the girl's 
answer fitted neatly into his prepared closing. "Even 
knowledge of how the road signs read in a fork in the road 
eight miles north of Northpass Keep."
    
    He gestured to the slate; spoke a Word under his breath. 
"Knowledge. Always knowledge," appeared on it.
    
    As the students drifted out of the lecture hall into the 
corridor, Ellen and Mari were joined by a third girl, named 
Alys.
    
    "Did you make it up? Is there really a signpost eight 
miles north of the castle?" Alys asked.
    
    Mari smiled and said nothing, then relented. "As a 
matter of fact there is. My horse went lame there last year, 
when we were guesting with the Castellan. I had to walk him 
back. Eight miles."
    
    "I was hoping you had made it up. Magister Bertram would 
never have caught you; he's an old stick. Coelus and Simon 
are much cuter."
    
    The boy who had suggested burning down the stable joined 
the three girls, introducing himself as Jon.  "Very clever 
of you, my lady-changing the sign. Would never have thought 
of it."
    
    "I would never have thought of setting fire to the 
stable. Mine only worked because I happened to know that 
place, by accident."
    
    Ellen shook her head. "Nothing works everywhere. Jon's 
solution works more places than yours does. But yours was 
very clever, because you had to see that one word could be 
changed to another. And it is a better example of Magister 
Bertram's point. "
    
    The third girl, Alys, looked puzzled. "What do you mean? 
What point?"
    
    "That the successful use of magic depends not only on 
arcane knowledge but on knowledge of everything. Mari 
happened to know something about the road north of Northpass 
keep. Jon knew about the risks of fire in a stable. A great 
mage will figure out how to use what he happens to know."
    
    Alys interrupted: "I know that messages are usually 
written on paper, and paper can burn. But that seemed like 
too easy an answer."
    
    Mari nodded. "I expect that it is harder to light a 
bundle of folded paper in the wallet at the messenger's side 
than a wisp of straw. And it only works if the messenger 
doesn't know what is in the message he is carrying. But if 
there are guard posts the messenger may need a letter of 
passage to get through them, which burns too."
    
    * * *
    
    Three days later, Mari and Ellen were seated in the 
small orchard at the south end of the College, sharing a 
luncheon platter of bread, apples, a sausage, and a chunk of 
cheese. Edwin passed by, but seemed hesitant to join them.  
Mari whispered to Ellen, who turned and waved him over. 
"Come share with us; Mari brought more than we can eat, and 
this cheese of hers is really good."
    
    Edwin smiled a little shyly, hesitating. "Yes, do come," 
Mari chimed in, "it's much nicer here than back in the 
refectory and we do have plenty." Doubly invited he gave in, 
walked over, and sat down. The southern boundary of the 
orchard was a low brick wall, the containment dome just 
beyond it. Ellen, turning back to Mari, pointed to it, as 
Edwin cut himself a slice of apple. "What do you see when 
you look at it?"
    
    Mari thought a moment. "A wall of bright mist. How can 
the apple trees grow so well?  Doesn't it keep them from 
getting enough sunlight?"
    
    Ellen shook her head. "It doesn't stop the light, just 
the seeing. The dome is a barrier against magic. Some 
theorists think seeing is magical, for how else can we know 
what is happening far away just from the light that reaches 
our eyes? That's one of the arguments for the theory that 
even animals have a tiny bit of magic, since they can see 
too. If the light gets through and the magic doesn't, the 
trees are fine."
    
    "So if something sucked all of the magic out of you, you 
would be blind?" That was Edwin, talking through a mouthful 
of bread and apple.
    
    "Maybe. There isn't any easy way of sucking magic out of 
a person, or any way of getting all of it. If seeing is 
magical, it must be a very deep kind. I'm not sure it is 
magic, anyway. Mother says the dome just scrambles the light 
and magic has nothing to do with why we see it that way."
    
    "How do you see it?" That was Mari.
    
    Ellen hesitated a moment, closed her eyes, opened them, 
squinted. "Mostly, as a wall of woven fire, but if I try 
hard to block my perception and just use my eyes, it's a 
wall of mist, just as you said."
    
    Edwin finished chewing his current mouthful, spoke. "I 
like your explanations, Ellen. They're very clear. Tell me, 
do you think Magister Coelus believes in elementals, or not. 
From what he says, I can't tell."
    
    Ellen considered the matter briefly. "The first question 
is what you mean by elementals. There are three answers. One 
of them Magister Coelus doesn't believe in, one he isn't 
sure, and one he believes in absolutely."
    
    "You are talking in riddles, just as he does." Mari 
lifted a reproachful finger at Ellen. "Explain."
    
    "The first kind of elementals are the ones in stories, 
magical beings associated with the four elements, sometimes 
friendly, sometimes not.  Little creatures the clever mage 
tricks into helping him, and the stupid or evil mage gets 
tricked by, or angers. Salamanders are supposed to live in 
fires, and every hearth has a little one that the clever 
child learns to talk to. Sylphs in the air, gnomes in the 
earth, undines in the water. Coelus would regard these as 
stories. So do I.  Anyway, no mage has ever provided a 
reliable report of one, even though the stories say they are 
everywhere."
    
    "What of the elementals that do exist?" That was Mari.
    
    "The third category exists, but only on paper. For the 
sort of material covered in Coelus's advanced theory course, 
it is useful to have a symbol for pure fire, pure earth, or 
whatever. It's cleaner and makes the calculations easier, 
and all modern theorists do it."
    
    "So there aren't really any salamanders, any more than 
there is really a minus three, they're just useful in doing 
accounts?" Edwin sounded disappointed.
    
    "There is a theorist, Olver_not at the college, but 
supposed to be very good_who has been working for decades on 
an overarching theory of magic, the sort of theory that 
would explain why there are four elements and four natures 
and why the whole pattern of magic works the way it does, 
and maybe the pattern of other things as well, all other 
things. His idea is to start with very simple basics and 
build everything else up from that. He hasn't quite managed 
to do it, but some smart people think he may have something. 
I expect if you asked Coelus, he would say so. A lot of what 
Coelus teaches comes from Olver's early work.
    
    "Olver believes the elementals are real, and part of the 
structure of the world. But his are of the mathematical kind 
rather than the storybook kind. There is only one of each, 
of unlimited, if narrow, power. All the air magic in the 
world is based on the sylph; all the earth on the gnome. 
They may be beings, or perhaps more like forces of nature. 
And whatever they are, they are probably very dangerous."
    
    Edwin motioned to speak, and Ellen paused to let him.  
"When the Founder, Durilil, went looking for a salamander, 
what kind did he seek?"
    
    "Durilil and Feremund were followers of Olver. Durilil 
went in search of the Salamander, Feremund in search of the 
Undine. They found Feremund's body_drowned, on high, dry 
ground, or so they say. Durilil they never found at all, and 
after that, no one else went looking."
    
    They were all three quiet for a while after that, Mari 
and Edwin looking thoughtful, all three absorbed in 
finishing their lunch. When they had, Edwin thanked the two 
girls and excused himself to prepare for the fifth period 
lecture. After he had gone, Ellen turned to Mari. "He seems 
nice."
    
    Mari nodded. "Not clever enough for you, or high born 
enough for me, but a nice boy, and pleasant company."
    
    "You mean to marry? Is that what you think about when 
you meet boys?"
    
    "One of the things. College is pleasant, but life is out 
there waiting for me."
    
    There was another long silence; Ellen broke it. "Why are 
you here?"
    
    Mari gave her a curious glance. "You think I shouldn't 
be?"
    
    "You aren't really interested in magic, except that you 
find it as interesting as you find everything else. You 
aren't at all interested in the mathematics you need to 
properly understand it. You don't need it to make a 
living_you don't have to make a living. And this is not the 
best place to meet the kind of husband you want. I am glad 
you are here; you are the nicest person I have met here so 
far and one of the two most interesting. But I do not 
understand why you came."
    
    "You remember, the first time we talked, I asked you 
about witches and mages?"
    
    Ellen nodded.
    
    "Well, father is very up to date, and witches are 
useful, especially healers. My brother would probably have 
died two years ago, or, had he lived, been a cripple, were 
it not for ours. But they are not entirely respectable. I 
don't mean it as an insult to you or to your mother, but if 
a noble admitted his daughter to be a witch he would be 
daring others to make something of it.
    
    "Mages are different. The kingdom was founded by a mage 
king. His Majesty's younger brother trained at the College 
and is supposed to have helped the King with all sorts of 
things. So when word spread that the College was training 
women as mages _ ."
    
    "Your father decided that was a respectable thing for 
his daughter to do?"
    
    "Not just respectable. And not just useful; father can 
always hire mages, after all. But it was a new thing, and he 
wanted to be part of it. And our healer told him that I had 
talent _ ."
    
    "What did she say about your talent?"
    
    Mari shook her head. "That I had it. That I could be 
trained as a mage."
    
    Ellen considered the matter briefly, decided that truth 
was, as usual, better than the alternative. "You do have 
talent. But you do not have very much. If you learn to be 
very clever at using it_which will take a lot of work, but 
you are clever_you can do things with what you have. Joshua 
has more talent than you do but he's a lazy fool who will 
never bother to learn to use it properly. He just wants to 
go back home and tell people he is a mage. And he is not 
clever. You could be better than him. But you can never be 
very good. I'm sorry, but it's true."
    
    Mari looked down a moment, then up, smiled at her 
friend. "Do you always tell people the truth?"
    
    "Almost always. It's easier. If I were cleverer than I 
am, and understood people the way you do, perhaps I could do 
better than that, but I'm not. There is too much 
complication in the world; I don't want to make any more."
    
    "Thank you, at least this time. Being a powerful mage 
out of a storybook isn't what I care about, even if it is 
fun to imagine. After all, a mage is not what I am really 
going to be. But I would like to be able to do something 
with what talent I have, enough to be useful at least to me, 
and maybe to my family. Something that I did, not just 
something I was."
    
    The two were silent for a while. "You seem very sure 
about how much talent people have," Mari said. "Can you see 
it, the way you see the barrier down on the other side of 
the wall?"
    
    Ellen nodded.
    
    Mari looked around; the orchard was empty. "The 
magisters must be able to see it too, I suppose; that's how 
they know who to admit. Can they see what kind of talent you 
have? You seem reluctant to show it."
    
    "Mother warned me that some of the other students, if 
they knew what I was, would be jealous, and would make it 
unpleasant for me."
    
    "Because you are a fire mage?"
    
    "Yes. Women aren't supposed to be fire mages."
    
    "Can't some of the students, at least some of the older 
ones, see what you are, the same way you can see what I'm 
not?"
    
    "I don't let any of them. I veil_like putting a globe of 
dark glass around a candle, so long as I do it right.  Just 
enough so I seem like everyone else here, with a glimmer. 
It's hard. For me to pretend not to be a mage at all would 
be easier."
    
    "What about the magisters? Can they tell?"
    
    "If I veil, I veil against everyone. Some of the 
magisters are probably skilled enough to see what I am doing 
if they looked closely. I think one of them saw the first 
day, before I got in the habit. "
    
    "If the magisters are more powerful, have more talent, 
couldn't they just see right through your veil?"
    
    Ellen hesitated, and again decided in favor of truth. 
"They aren't more powerful. I think I'm the strongest mage 
in the college. That's the other half of why I veil."
    
    "Stronger even than Coelus?"
    
    "Coelus is not that strong. The magisters are not here 
for their strength. There are more powerful mages outside 
the college than any of them.  What is special about the 
magisters is that they understand magic and can teach it. A 
lot of mages know how to do magic but don't really 
understand what they are doing. Most of them, I think. That 
is why we are here.
    
    "What is special about Coelus is not the strength of his 
talent. Even in the college there are stronger mages. But he 
can find out things nobody knew before. Most of the spells 
mages use they learn from other mages; he is one of the few 
who create new ones. Even fewer invent spells they cannot 
themselves do_Coelus may be the only one. That is the beauty 
of theory. It lets you figure out what you could do if you 
were a water mage, even though you are a fire mage. Then you 
show it to a water mage and he goes and does it."
    
    The two girls sat quietly for a while, Mari thinking, 
Ellen watching a pigeon snatch crumbs then retreat to a safe 
distance to eat them. Finally Mari spoke. "How do you think 
that pigeon got in? Do you suppose he pecked at the entrance 
chime, and Magister Gatekeeper opened to let him through the 
sphere?"
    
    Ellen smiled at the image. "He must have come through 
with some of us; this isn't the first time I've fed him."
    
    Chapter 3  
    
    By the third month their regular lunch gatherings in the 
orchard or, if it was raining, the cloister next to it, were 
being referred to as Ellen's tutorial. Edwin, Jon, Mari, and 
Ellen were the regulars, with Alys and several other first 
years dropping in from time to time.
    
    Mari continued to provide cheese; Alys accused her of 
doing it to remind the others of just how bad refectory food 
was compared to the real world. Conversation almost always 
started with something one of the others wanted Ellen to 
explain, then drifted in almost any direction, from Jon's 
precise, professional explanation of what was in the sausage 
they were eating and how it got there, which put Alys off 
sausages for two weeks, to Mari's well informed and 
irreverent view of the upper reaches of kingdom politics.
    
    This afternoon the questioning started with Jon and 
dealt with a topic of practical concern to all of them.
    
    "I know the elements, and the natures, and that they are 
basis stars, along with some other things. I don't 
understand how each provides a full description of magic, 
but if you and Magister Coelus say so, it must be true. I 
also don't understand how this fits into mage types_fire 
mages and water mages. Fire and water are elements. But 
there are also healing mages, used to be called witches, and 
war mages. Are healing and war elements as well, or points 
of another basis star the magisters haven't gotten around to 
confusing us with yet?"
    
    Ellen thought for a moment before answering: "It's 
complicated."
    
    "It's always complicated." That was Edwin; Ellen, 
ignoring him, continued: "Mages get described both by what 
they do and by how they do it. A weaving mage is one whose 
power is mostly in the weaving point of the combinatorial 
basis star. A healing mage is one who uses power to heal 
people. One way of healing people is by weaving, not cloth 
but damaged flesh. So a healer might be a weaving mage.
    
    "But she doesn't have to be, because there are other 
talents that can be used to heal_including all of the points 
of that same star. A mage with power to refine could filter 
poisons out of blood, or fuse the poison with something else 
to render it harmless; fusing is refining done backwards, 
like weaving and untangling. So a healer is one who has 
learned ways of using magic to heal. A weaving mage or a 
refining mage is someone who uses that particular kind of 
magic."
    
    Jon cut into the conversation: "Just as some farmers are 
good with animals, some good at seeing weeds and pulling 
them, some strong, and some clever about what crops to plant 
where."
    
    Ellen nodded. Edwin joined in. "So a war mage is one 
trained to use his skills for war? A fire mage would burn 
the enemy up, a water mage flood them, or a damp mage make 
their tents mildew?" The last got a laugh from Alys, a smile 
from Ellen.
    
    "Mildew might even be more effective than the rest, over 
time. A war mage uses his talents for war, some more 
effective than others, but practically anything can be used 
if you are clever. Mari's changing a road sign could be 
effective if it sent an army off in the wrong direction. We 
are born with talents that we can't change, but we can 
decide how we use them. That is what the third year 
tutorials are mostly about, for those who choose to stay for 
the third year."
    
    "But how much choice do you really have?" That was Mari. 
"If you are a fire mage," she deliberately kept her tone 
level, "healing, or farming, or most other things are not 
really an option, because they are not things fire can do."
    
    Ellen shook her head. "Powers are hardly ever pure. A 
fire mage is not someone who can only do fire, but one who 
is better at doing fire than at doing other things. Combine 
fire with refining and you can draw gold out of the ground, 
if you are good enough at it. And if you are mostly fire, 
but a little refining, your fire can provide the power and 
your refining control it.
    
    "Most mages are a mix of talents, strongest at one but 
with some power in others. A pure mage can't do much; there 
is a limit to what you can build out of pure fire or pure 
air. A fire mage with a little earth talent, or an air mage 
with a little earth, can do a lot more, get most of the 
power for a spell or a construction from one point, then 
structure it with the talent from another, or several 
others."
    
    Mari nodded. "So the strongest mage of all would be one 
with all four points of a star, or all four points of all 
the stars?"
    
    "Not the strongest." Ellen paused a moment, trying to 
see how to explain. "A mage with all four elements would be 
the most flexible. He could do more things, but since he 
wouldn't have much power in any element, he couldn't do much 
of anything. And one star would be enough. If you have all 
four elements, then you have everything; you just have to 
learn how to combine them. That's why the theory Magister 
Coelus teaches, which some of you think doesn't matter, 
really does.  It is the theory that tells you how it all 
fits together, how someone with the right elemental talents 
can learn to do spells out of natural or combinatorial 
magic."
    
    Edwin shook his head. "Theory matters to you and to 
Magister Coelus. It doesn't matter to me, though I do my 
best to understand it. I am going to learn the spells to do 
what I want with the talents that I have. Someone else can 
figure out what those spells are. Magister Bertram is my 
guide to how I can use my skills to get the results I want. 
That isn't magical theory at all, just the same problem 
everyone faces, mage or not. Mages merely have extra ways of 
solving it."
    
    Ellen nodded. "That you know you need to learn how to 
use spells is precisely why you and Mari will be better 
mages than those who only learn to cast them. Learning 
spells may make you a mage.  But not a very useful one. 
That's why there were very effective mages a hundred years 
ago, back when how a mage could use air and fire to do the 
same spell as a mage with heat was still a puzzle."
    
    The students were silent for some minutes, thinking 
about this, till the front gate bell sounded time for the 
afternoon lecture.
     
    
    Chapter 4  
    
    "Come in"
    
    It was the girl student, the special one. Ellen.
    
    "You wanted to speak to me, Magister Coelus?"
    
    He looked up at her. A little short, a little broad, 
simply dressed. Not a woman who would stand out in a crowd. 
Face plain but not ugly. And, as had become increasingly 
clear, a mind easily matching her carefully concealed 
talent.
    
    "I have a project. A very important project, I believe. 
It requires the help of several mages; I would like you to 
be one of them."
    
    There was a long silence as she considered the matter.
    
    "Would not one of your colleagues be better suited to 
help you?"
    
    "Most of my colleagues can see nothing new in magery for 
the past fifty years and look for nothing new for the next 
hundred. I expect to have Maridon's help, and perhaps I can 
get one of the others. But to do the project properly 
requires four mages, one for each of the four elements. Or 
the four points of one of the other stars, but the elements 
are easiest. I am Air, Maridon is Earth. We need Fire and 
Water, and you are Fire.
    
    "Besides, even if I could get help from another 
magister, you, student or not, are the strongest fire mage 
in the College. I think you know it. If you did not why 
would you choose to veil?"
    
    She was silent for a space, then asked: "What is your 
project?"
    
    "You know that two mages can pool_we discussed it in 
class last month."
    
    Ellen nodded.
    
    "Mostly, pooling is done by two mages of the same sort, 
two fire mages, or two healers. It is possible but much less 
common and more difficult for two mages to combine different 
talents for a single work. I believe it is how the 
containment sphere was crafted, fire and weaving together."
    
    She looked up startled, started to speak, stopped.
    
    Coelus continued: "The records are not clear on how it 
was done, but that is the only explanation I can see, and I 
have examined the sphere closely.
    
    "I believe I have discovered a way in which four mages, 
one for each point of a basis star, can pool. The pool then 
spans all magery. Better still, it can be used to pull more 
and more magery into the pool, from mages of all sorts and 
even from ordinary people.
    
    "Think how much we could do with the pooled talent of 
fifty mages and five hundred, or five thousand, or fifty 
thousand ordinary people, each adding his trifle of talent 
to the pool, pouring it through a trained mage. Almost 
unlimited power to end a plague, to heal even someone at the 
point of death, to build a road or monument, to do things 
that no single mage, whatever his talent, could do before. 
And since the pool would span the whole range of magery, the 
power could be used for anything.
    
    "Half the courses in the curriculum are a waste of time 
for you; you already know them. That has been clear for 
months. I could set up a course of independent study to 
teach you the theory behind the Cascade Effect, get your 
help with the research_"
    
    She interrupted. "The people you pull in; must they give 
their consent to lend you their magery?"
    
    "How could they? We are not talking about a group of 
four or five mages but about hundreds or thousands or tens 
of thousands of people, most not mages, and the mages among 
them would be mostly half-trained. Not one mage in ten is a 
graduate of the College. How could I ask all of them, and, 
if I could, how could they understand what I was asking them 
to do?"
    
    "I thank you for the offer, Magister Coelus. If you wish 
to instruct me in theory, I will be happy to learn. But I 
will not aid you to take what is not freely given."
    
    "You will not _ ."
    
    "I will not help you to take from mages their power, or 
from common people the magery that aids them in growing 
their crops, hunting their game, without their consent, 
whatever purpose you propose to use it for."
    
    He looked at the girl in astonishment, felt for words to 
explain. "You don't understand. There is so much to be done, 
so little power to do it with. A river floods.  With enough 
magery in the hands of a water mage with proper skills, we 
could divert the water to where it would be harmless. A 
plague kills hundreds, mothers and fathers"_his voice 
faltered_"leaving behind orphaned children. Enough power in 
the hands of a healer could see the plague when it first 
struck, cure everyone before the sickness spread further. So 
much to do, and we are so weak.
    
    "You are young, sheltered. If you had seen _ . I cannot 
make you aid me. But consider the needless deaths and misery 
that might happen if you do not."
    
    She shook her head. "My mother is a healer; I have seen 
sickness enough. Men with gaping wounds that she has closed. 
When you have seized her power to shift a flood, on whose 
hands will be the blood of those she cannot heal?"
    
    There was a long silence. Ellen nodded to Magister 
Coelus, turned, left the room.
    
    * * *
    
    "She won't help."
    
    Maridon looked up from his desk. "Come in, sit down, 
tell me about it. Was she afraid she might get hurt if 
something went wrong?"
    
    "That wasn't it. She thought what we wanted to do was 
wrong."
    
    Maridon looked puzzled. "How can it be wrong to gather 
the power needed to make the world a better place?"
    
    "She was unhappy over using power without the mages' 
consent, even though I explained why we couldn't possibly 
ask everyone."
    
    "Some youngsters are like that, especially girls. They 
worry too much about following rules, not enough about what 
it takes in the real world to get anything done. High and 
noble principles sound very well, but they do not count much 
in the balance against what we can accomplish once we have 
the Cascade working.
    
    "It is something we have to watch out for; youngsters 
are not the only ones who miss the bigger picture. I would 
not be in the least surprised if Dag reacted the same way; 
you know what an icicle he is about keeping to the bounds. 
Good thing he is off looking for more talent.
    
    "In fact, it might be better if you leave out the 
Cascade when talking to the others. Just describe what we 
want to do as a pooling of four mages to span all of magery 
and make possible all combinations. That is impressive 
enough to get their attention, but not enough to start the 
more rigid of our colleagues nattering at us."
    
    Coelus still looked worried. "You don't think she's 
right? She is worried about what might go wrong while we 
were draining off mages' power into the Cascade."
    
    "So they stop killing off bedbugs for rich innkeepers, 
or healing sick cattle. You know as well as I do that most 
mages outside the College aren't doing anything that really 
matters_not to mention those inside. With this pooled power, 
we can do things that do really matter. There is always 
something that could go wrong in whatever you do. Every 
hunter knows his arrow might miss the deer and hit a man who 
happens to be on the far side. That doesn't stop him from 
hunting. Healing someone today may mean he might kill 
someone else tomorrow. That's no reason not to heal people.
    
    "Your Cascade is the biggest breakthrough in 
generations. It will make you famous and make it possible to 
do things no mage could ever do before."
    
    Maridon paused a moment, then continued speaking. "Is 
the girl a gossip? Will she be telling everyone in the 
college about your project and how wicked it is? If so _"
    
    Coelus thought a moment. "She doesn't talk much with the 
others and veils her power all the time. As far as I know 
you and I are the only ones who see her as anything more 
than ordinary. Hal didn't at the interview. Considering what 
I went through as a student, I can see why she keeps her 
head down. At least she won't have half the class looking 
for ways to make her life miserable."
    
    "Would it help if you spoke to her, just to make sure, 
told her it would be breaking a confidence to babble about 
your work? Suggest that you will be happy to teach her, but 
only if her confidentiality can be trusted? It is not every 
student who has the chance of personal lessons from a mage 
of your ability."
    
    Coelus looked doubtful. "Let me think about it."
    
    "You think. I will listen for rumors, and consider what 
to do if need be. Both of us can think about where to find 
two more mages for the real experiment, once you finish the 
preliminary series. But this time, before you ask anyone 
else, talk to me first."
    
    "I will. I suppose I should have earlier. But she was 
the obvious choice, once I thought of it, and it never 
occurred to me that she might object."
    
    * * *
    
    As the notes of the evening bell died away, Ellen looked 
around the small orchard, then down at the message in her 
hand. Coelus wanted to speak with her again. The orchard had 
a pleasant smell to it that she did not remember from 
earlier visits, green mixed with the rich odor of the earth. 
It was getting late; another hour or two and she would be in 
bed. Already she felt sleepy, sleepy enough to lie down on 
the grass by one of the trees, nestle her head on the warm 
earth, and close her eyes.
    
    A searing pain on her right hand woke her, as if someone 
had blown a flame across it. She opened her eyes and tried 
to lift her hand to look at it. It was almost dark. 
Something, cold and strong, was holding her arm, keeping it 
from moving. Her body, lying flat when she fell asleep, was 
now almost vertical.
    
    She bent her head, looked down, and saw grass just below 
her chin. Somehow she had sunk into the earth. Her head, 
neck, right hand and part of the arm were still above ground 
and she could move her toes, but not her legs. She felt 
herself being sucked down, farther.
    
    She drew in a deep breath. Fighting the pressure of the 
earth against her chest, she looked up. Just above was the 
apple tree she had fallen asleep against, its thick old 
trunk motionless, branches moving slowly in the wind, one 
low one almost within reach if only her arm were free.
    
    What else could she use? The grass around her was long. 
With a thought she bent it down and wove it into a thick mat 
just below her right hand. Pushing down as hard as she 
could, she levered her arm up. The ground was soft, but the 
mat of woven grass held firm. Her right arm pulled free. 
Straining upward, she grasped a twig on the branch above her 
and held it.
    
    Just above that branch was another; under her stern gaze 
the two began to twist together, pulled in a third, forming 
a thick triple braid of woven branches that dipped to twist 
around her wrist. More and more branches bent down and added 
themselves. The mat of grass became a green sleeve, cradling 
her arm, its ends weaving in and out of the braid.
    
    She pulled down with her right arm against the woven 
branches, up with her left, trying to break it free. Not 
enough. She stopped, breathed deeply against the pressure of 
the earth, and thought her way back into the pattern of the 
tree, downwards. A root moved against her foot, another. She 
felt something move against her imprisoned left arm. Again 
she pulled down with her right arm on the braided branches, 
straining to lift herself.
    
    Her left arm broke free; the hollow where it had been 
was so thick with woven rootlets she could see only a bit of 
earth beneath. She reached her freed arm up, caught the 
branches, and pulled, now with both arms.
    
    Eyes closed that she might better see, she looked down 
her body, still buried in the ground. Small roots were 
running up her legs, sending out rootlets, weaving together 
a loose fabric which guarded her from the earth that had 
tried to swallow her. But most of her body was still 
trapped. Against the pressure of the earth even to breathe 
was hard.
    
    There was only so much one tree could do for her.
    
    The edge of the containment dome flared, more brilliant 
than she had ever seen it. There might be an answer; she 
felt her way into its woven fire. Power, more than a dozen 
trees, a hundred. With the fingers of her mind she teased 
out one strand, two, three, more, wove a garment of flame 
about her body.
    
    She felt the ground shudder, release her. Letting go of 
the branches, she put her hands against now solid ground, 
heaved herself out of her half formed grave, and stumbled 
over to the apple tree. She leaned against it gasping for 
breath. A few minutes were enough to unweave branches and 
grass. The gaping hole in the earth was no work of hers.  
She would leave closing it, or not, to whomever had made it.
    
    Ellen looked down for the note she had been holding when 
she fell asleep. Hard to see in the faint moonlight, but it 
seemed to be gone. She brought a tiny flame from one finger 
tip; still nothing.
    
    In its faint light she could see the sorry state of her 
over robe and the tunic beneath, both filthy and torn. The 
rips she could fix, but _ . She let the flame go out, 
reached into the dark, and wove a thick cloak of shadow 
about herself.
    
    Back in her room she closed and barred the door and set 
the small oil lamp aflame, then stripped out of her robe. 
Her right hand hurt. The palm was red and a few small 
blisters had begun to form. Something had burned it. 
Something had awoken her just before she was fully buried.
    
    Two puzzles then, perhaps two mages, if this had not 
been merely a bizarre accident. She would think about them 
tomorrow. For tonight, she reached into the lamp flame, 
pulled out a thin strand of fire, and formed about her 
wrist, arm, and body a pale garment, an armor of woven 
flame. Paler and still paler, until it vanished to a ghost 
even she could barely see. She put out the lamp, went to 
bed, closed her eyes and, in time, slept.
    
    Chapter 5  
    
    The next day Ellen awoke to the pleasant sound of rain 
on the slate roof above her bed. Judging by the amount of 
water on the paving stones, it had been raining for some 
time. She lay in bed, stiff and sore from the previous 
evening's struggle, wondering what condition the orchard was 
in. The rain should be good for the apple tree; she thought 
briefly about what if anything she could do to compensate 
for diverting so much of the tree's stored resources to her 
use.
    
    Last night's clothing she could wash in her wash basin, 
then repair the damage. No need to start talk by involving 
the College servants, or anyone else. Best to take her own 
precautions, keep her eyes open, and wait for her hidden 
enemy to make his next move.
    
    The breakfast bell broke into her thoughts, and brought 
her out of bed.
    
    By lunch time the rain had gotten harder, the first real 
storm that fall. Mari met Ellen at the entrance to the 
refectory. "The orchard will be a swamp by now, and the 
cloister damp. The dining hall is packed. I've been telling 
the others to get their food then head to my rooms for an 
indoor picnic."
    
    Ellen fetched a plate and bowl, filled them, and 
followed her friend. The desk in Mari's sitting room had 
been pulled out, the three chairs around it occupied by 
Mari, Alys, and Edwin, who offered his to Ellen. She 
declined in favor of the floor, back against the door to 
Mari's bedroom. Jon joined her there and put the first 
question:
    
    "Magister Simon has had us memorizing names in the true 
speech for a month now, but I still don't understand what 
it's all about. Nobody speaks it, not even the Doray, so why 
learn it for spells?"
    
    Ellen, as usual, thought a moment before answering. 
"What's special about the true speech is that spells done in 
it work. Lots of people say they know why, but most disagree 
with each other. The Dorayans claimed that our world was a 
story told by the creator God, and the speech was the 
language that story was told in; the surviving Doray sects, 
here and in what's left of the League, still believe that. 
The orthodox sects, or at least some of their mages, say 
names in the true speech are those the first man gave 
everything on the day of creation."
    
    "What do you believe?" That was Mari.
    
    "That spells done in the true speech work. I don't know 
why, but it might be because the names aren't arbitrary, the 
way names are in other languages."
    
    Edwin looked up, spoke. "You mean that confusing 
business about the component syllables from the first 
lecture that Simon has hardly mentioned since?"
    
    Ellen nodded. "Yes. A name in the speech isn't just a 
name, it's a definition. If you break up the word for 
"horse," the pieces come out as "hornless quadruped with 
mane." And of course "mane" itself isn't a single syllable; 
it means "neck hair." And there are long forms for both 
"neck" and "hair" that get squished down to single syllables 
for building other words out of."
    
    Alys put down her piece of bread, joined the 
conversation. "But none of that really matters, does it? 
We're learning the names; there's no need to make it even 
harder by learning why they are the names. I don't have to 
know the word for 'mane;' I'm not enchanting horses' manes."
    
    Ellen shook her head. "It matters for two reasons. The 
first is that the definition tells you what the name you are 
memorizing means. If you do a spell on horses, you only 
expect it to affect horses. But if you are using the true 
name for "horse"_and you will be if you want the spell to 
work_it will affect any other hornless quadruped with a mane 
that happens to be in the area. The true name for "horse" 
doesn't really mean "horse," it means _"
    
    Jon cut in. "Hornless quadruped with mane. That could be 
a mule, even a donkey."
    
    "Yes. And the same is true of every name you use in a 
spell. If you want to affect only the horses, you have to 
say something that amounts to 'horse but not mule.' It's 
really very much like mathematics, especially mathematical 
logic." Ellen stopped a moment to take a bite of bread.
    
    Mari reached over for the wine bottle. "Which explains 
why I don't understand it. I'm with Alys this time. Word for 
word translation may not get it exactly right, but if the 
alternative is mathematical logic I will have to be content 
with almost." She half filled her glass, put the bottle 
back.
    
    "I said there were two reasons. The other is that if you 
understand how true names are built you can build one. You 
don't have to say 'horse but not mule'_which expands into a 
lot more than that in the speech. You can sayfertile 
hornless quadruped with mane' instead."
    
    Jon grinned: "Not if you want your spell to work on 
geldings."
    
    "I hadn't thought of that. But it shows why you have to 
understand how names are built. Someone might construct the 
name I just offered and teach it to you as an improved 
version of 'horse' and if you didn't understand the pieces 
of it you would never figure out why some of the horses were 
still coming down with worms after you had spelled all of 
them not to."
    
    "Do you think you could keep worms out of it until I'm 
finished eating? Jon's account of sausage last month was bad 
enough."
    
    Ellen looked at Alys, puzzled. "I thought it was very 
interesting. If you don't like worms, make it something 
else."
    
    "Cracked hooves and splints. That is what our horses are 
always coming down with. If Alys doesn't like worms and 
sausages, she can always eat bread and cheese." Mari passed 
what was left of the small wheel of cheese across the desk.
    
    "Haven't told you about making cheese?" Jon was 
grinning.
    
    Mari gave him a stern look. "And you shan't. Not today, 
at least, or poor Alys may starve to death. Anyway, I have 
another question for Ellen. About names."
    
    She paused, turned to look at her friend. "Why do mages 
never change their names, even when pretending to be someone 
else? Why do they avoid giving their names, and use 
nicknames, and confuse people in other ways? Why not just 
take a different name? Is it only in the stories, or is it 
real?"
    
    "It's real."
    
    Edwin looked up from his plate. "Do people have names in 
the true speech? Do you have a name? 'Short dark haired lady 
who knows everything about magic?'"
    
    Ellen shook her head. "That's not how it works. The 
Speech has a word for 'person,' and 'woman,' but not for 
particular people. Though I am sure you and Mari can have 
fun making them up. My name is 'Ellen'_'Elinor' in long 
form. It is what I've always been called. Spells cast on me 
are anchored to that name. If I didn't want to be spelled I 
could change my name to weaken the connection.
    
    "A mage cares more about casting spells than about 
stopping others from casting spells on him. A spell is 
anchored at both ends. If I changed my name, my spells would 
stop working, or at least working as well. The more and the 
longer people called me by the new name, the weaker the old 
name would get, the less it would be me, and the weaker any 
spells I tried to anchor to it.
    
    "I could have changed my name when I was two, I suppose. 
But if I changed my name now and tried to shift everything 
to it, I would never be as strong as I am now. That's why 
mages in the stories keep their own names, even if they are 
doing their best to hide who they are.
    
    "The only words you can read in written spells and 
amulets are people's names. The rest are in glyphs, the 
written form of the true speech. Each word is a symbol, 
almost a little drawing, not of the thing, but a graphic 
definition, made up of little bits each of which corresponds 
to an element in the definition. I expect Simon will get to 
that next semester."
    
    "After he gives up on teaching us the spoken version?" 
Mari ate her last bit of cheese, pushed back the plate. "He 
will teach us to try to draw words?" She stood up, opened 
the window looking out over the College's kitchen garden, 
looked out. It was still raining.
    
    "Isn't it wonderful to have something to look forward 
to."
    
    The others snickered; Ellen stared at them, head to one 
side, perplexed.
    
    Chapter 6  
    
    A room, scantily furnished. At the end by the door a 
desk, an untidy pile of codices, a few scrolls. Along one 
long side a work table, its wooden top scarred and scorched. 
Two mages, earth and air.
    
    Coelus carefully arranged the small brazier on the table 
over the chalk mark for fire. Over the other mark, part way 
down the table, a glass goblet, clear as water, beside it 
the sealed flask. He motioned Maridon over to the fourth 
mark.
    
    A knock on the door.
    
    "Come in."
    
    "Am I late? Magister Maridon said at the sixth bell." 
The student looked a little uncertain.
    
    "No. Just in time. Sit over there, facing the wall. This 
should not take very long."
    
    Joshua took his seat. Coelus went to the far end of the 
table, opened the clay fire box, used a small pair of silver 
tongs to remove one glowing coal. Into the brazier. He blew 
gently on it, was rewarded with a trickle of smoke, a pale 
flame.
    
    Next the flask, unstoppered, a thin stream of water into 
the goblet.
    
    "Galfred sent it; with luck there's enough _"
    
    A wide silver spoon filled with grey powder; he 
sprinkled it onto the brazier. The charcoal burst into 
brilliant flame. Back to his own place, the fourth point of 
the star.
    
    Coelus spoke a Word. For a moment nothing happened. He 
raised his hand, spoke again. From his hand to Maridon, a 
faint white line. Maridon raised his hand, spoke a Word; 
their two hands were linked by a double thread, white and 
black. Coelus lifted his left hand; as he let it fall the 
two spoke the third Word together.
    
    From Coelus the double thread leaped to the brazier. 
Triple now, the black and white lines clear, the red line 
barely a thread. To the goblet.
    
    The four_two mages, the brazier, the goblet_were the 
corners of a square, its edges traced in four-fold lines, 
the mage's colors bright, the other two, blue and red, 
spiderweb thin. Coelus spoke a final Word.
    
    From Joshua to Coelus' hand another thread of light; to 
Coelus it seemed a turning twist of white and blue. For a 
moment everything froze, the square outlined in fourfold 
light, the fifth line.
    
    With a sharp crack the flask broke, spilling water and 
fragments of glass onto the table. The threads of light 
vanished, the blue an instant before the others. Joshua 
cried out, stood, tried to turn, and fell face forward onto 
the floor.
    
    "Did it work?" That was Maridon. Coelus, bent over the 
fallen student, took a moment to answer.
    
    "I think so. The elemental water must have run out. The 
boy is still breathing; I think he'll be all right. If it 
hadn't worked, how could he have reacted as he did; that's 
the clearest evidence. I can hardly perceive any magery at 
all in him now. Besides, I saw the fifth line, even if only 
for a second.
    
    "But I have the geometry wrong; it's unbalanced, with me 
as both starpoint and focus. It needs five mages, four for 
the basis star, one for the focus. I suppose four mages 
might work, but not as well, and it might be dangerous. I 
think the other part of what unbalanced it was using 
substitutes, elemental reagents to stand in for their mages. 
But five would be better."
    
    "So it works in theory, but not yet in practice."
    
    "It worked in practice, just not for very long. I could 
feel power coming in from the boy. Just a trickle, but more 
than we were getting from the workbench alone and it felt 
different from ours. With five mages, maybe even with four, 
we could do it."
    
    "The boy we pulled from is a mage, even if he is not 
trained. What about the rest of the Cascade?"
    
    "I don't think we can pull from plain people yet, not 
with half the star filled with tokens instead of mages. Even 
with four or five mages it would be hard. If my calculations 
are right, the best way is to cascade over a dozen mages or 
more, then use the pool to start pulling in plain folk."
    
    Maridon walked over to the unconscious student, nudged 
him with a toe. "What about him?"
    
    Coelus bent over Joshua, examined him carefully. "His 
breathing is fine, his heart is beating, I can even see a 
faint glow of magery, so that is coming back all right. We 
drained him too much; I need to find a way of keeping the 
flow down to what the source can keep giving. I expect he'll 
wake up in a bit. With luck he will be willing to help 
again; we need an outsider with at least a little power to 
test the Cascade. But we ought to send for a healer for him 
now, just to be safe."
    
    Maridon shook his head.
    
    "The fewer know about this the better; we do not want to 
start rumors, whether among our colleagues or the students. 
I will trust your judgment that he is all right. I talked to 
him this morning; I do not think there will be a problem 
getting him to help again. You do the calculations, work out 
the next test. I will see about getting us two or three more 
mages for when you are ready to do a real Cascade. Not from 
the College; the fewer rumors the better until we are ready 
to show our colleagues what real magery looks like."
    
    Maridon gave the unconscious student a final glance, 
turned, left the room. Coelus took the student's folded 
cloak off the back of his chair, spread it over him, folded 
up his own cloak to make a pillow, sat down in the other 
chair to wait.
    
    A mage's workroom. A body on the floor, a mage sitting 
watching it. Slowly the image faded.
    
    Chapter 7  
    
    "Have you done the work I assigned?"
    
    Ellen nodded. "Yes. But before I hand it in, I have a 
question."
    
    Coelus looked at her quizzically. She was holding a thin 
stack of neatly written sheets.
    
    "Do you know the answers to all those problems for ways 
of building a pool to span all of magery?"
    
    He thought a moment. "Almost all. The last one, the 
combinatorial star, I have not actually calculated, since we 
have none of the mages it requires, but it is 
straightforward enough. I don't expect to have any 
difficulty judging your answer."
    
    "Any right answer will do? It does not have to be the 
best?"
    
    That got his attention. "Is finding a better solution 
too much work for you, once you have one?"
    
    She shook her head. "I told you; I wish to learn, but I 
am not willing to help with your project. If you tell me you 
have solutions, I will be happy to show you mine. But I will 
not work to make it easier for you to drain mages, or 
others, without their consent."
    
    "So you want me to help you learn, but you will not help 
me?"
    
    "I have done my best to offer you the one thing I have 
to give that matters. So far I have not succeeded. If one of 
the other magisters asked you to help him devise a better 
love philtre, would you do it?"
    
    "Of course not. Compulsions are _ ."
    
    "Compulsions are beyond the bounds of proper magery. So 
Magister Henryk told us the first day of class, and I 
believe it. To pool the power of," she hesitated a moment, 
"of four mages with their assent, and in so doing span all 
forms of magery, is indeed a fine thing. To calculate out 
how one mage can use the pooled power to do, in the limit, 
everything that a mage of any sort could do, is a puzzle 
worthy of your ability. Farther than that is compulsion."
    
    He looked up, struck by something she had said. "If you 
were doing it, how many mages would you use?"
    
    She said nothing.
    
    "I see. Let me look through those papers, and I will 
think about whether I can accept your terms and still teach 
you."
    
    Ellen handed him the stack, turned and left. He looked 
after her for a long minute before looking down at her work.
    
    The next day when she returned, he was the one with a 
question: "What you handed me. Was that all of your work, or 
only the final result?"
    
    She looked puzzled. "All of the written work. Paper is 
expensive, and it is hard to work clearly on a tablet. 
Things are tidier inside my head."
    
    He smiled. "For me too. I am not sure I have met anyone 
else who feels the same way until now. You worked out the 
answers in your head, then wrote them down on what you gave 
me?"
    
    "Yes. It's easiest at night, in bed with my eyes 
closed."
    
    "And you wrote down only the first answer you found?"
    
    She hesitated. "Sometimes. Sometimes the second answer 
was simpler, so I wrote that down instead."
    
    "I am sorry I cannot persuade you of the good I hope to 
do. I have here," he handed her a single sheet, "six more 
problems. None are part of the Cascade project, I promise 
you. Five, I know the answer to. I will let you decide which 
five, if you can."
    
    Her sudden smile was brilliant, lighting up the face he 
had at first thought plain. She took the sheet, dropped a 
brief curtsey_it felt more like the bow before a duel_and 
left the room.
    
    * * *
    
    She returned the next morning, papers in hand. He looked 
up from his desk. "You look tired."
    
    She nodded. "The first three were easy. The fourth _ I 
found an answer, but it's hack work, clumsy. I gave up on 
trying to find a better one when I got too sleepy."
    
    "So you didn't do the last two?"
    
    "I did them, then went back and tried to do the fourth 
better. Then I gave up and went to sleep."
    
    She handed him the sheets, covered with her precise 
script. He started reading, stopped and looked up.
    
    "This will take a while. Sit down before you fall down." 
He went back to the papers.
    
    He handed her back the stack when he was done. "Your 
solution to the fifth problem requires a mage who spans fire 
and weaving and another who spans air and fusing. Where do 
you plan to find them?"
    
    "It also requires most of a gallon each of elemental 
earth and water. You put no limits on the materials I could 
use."
    
    He nodded. "True enough."
    
    "I did find a more elegant solution to the fourth 
problem, but it required the assistance of two of the 
elementals. Since nobody knows if elementals are more than a 
convenient mathematical device, I decided it did not 
qualify."
    
    "Not to mention that nobody has found even one, and the 
last mage who went looking disappeared forty odd years ago."
    
    "I also found a way of doing what you want that involves 
no compulsion at all, at least I don't think so. 
Unfortunately _"
    
    For a moment he thought she was serious, then he looked 
at her face.
    
    "It also requires all four elementals, one at each point 
of the star. Unlimited power, so no need to drag in anyone 
else. And however much you use, there is as much and more 
left for the rest of us."
    
    His smile answered hers. "An excellent solution in 
theory but I am afraid there may be some small difficulties 
putting it into practice."
    
    * * *
    
    "How old do you think Magister Coelus really is?"
    
    Ellen responded to Alys with a puzzled expression; Mari 
put it into words. "What do you mean? He's older than we 
are, but younger than the other magisters. Thirty, maybe, or 
a little under?"
    
    Alys shook her head. "That's how he looks. But everybody 
knows mages can make themselves younger. That's one point of 
being a mage. For all we know, he could be a hundred and 
thirty and been teaching the same course for the past 
hundred years."
    
    Mari looked at Ellen helplessly. Ellen took a bite of 
cheese before answering. "He can't have been teaching here 
for the past hundred years, because the college isn't a 
hundred years old. Most of what he is teaching wasn't known 
a hundred years ago. The library has records of faculty and 
curriculum going back almost to the founding; if you are 
curious you could check them. I would be surprised if he has 
been here as long as a dozen years.
    
    "And he can't be a hundred and thirty because no mage is 
strong enough to hold his physical age down by a hundred 
years for more than few minutes."
    
    Alys looked unconvinced. "Records can always be changed, 
especially by mages. The Mage King was still fighting 
battles when he was past a hundred, wasn't he?"
    
    Mari nodded. "Theodrick fought his last battle at a 
hundred and twenty-three. I don't know what his apparent age 
was then, but I doubt it was thirty. Don't you know how 
Theodrick died?"
    
    "Didn't he die in his last war with Forstmark? The one 
we won."
    
    "But do you know how?"
    
    Alys shook her head and waited for Mari to continue.
    
    "Ellen probably knows the story better than I do, but as 
I understand it he was using a team of mages to keep him 
young enough to rule the kingdom as well as command the army 
in the field. By the final war it was taking a lot of the 
best mages to do it. The Forsting were winning. At a hundred 
and twenty-three, Theodrick named the ablest of his 
grandsons heir, had him crowned, then sent the mages 
supporting him to help the army instead. He was buried in a 
closed coffin with a handsome statue on it representing him 
when he won the crown."
    
    "Why couldn't he just spell himself younger, or have his 
mages do it, then send them off to fight the war?"
    
    Mari looked at Ellen, who took the hint. "It doesn't 
work that way. A mage with suitable training can make 
himself younger, but it isn't a spell you just do and it 
stays done. You have to keep maintaining it. The older you 
are, the more power it takes. I expect Coelus could push his 
age down by a year or two without much trouble, but more 
than that wouldn't leave him with a lot of power to do 
anything else with. If he tried to hold to thirty, in a few 
years it would be taking all his power to do it, and at some 
point his age would have to start going up again."
    
    "So even if I study hard, pass the second year exams and 
learn all they teach me, I still won't be able to be 
nineteen forever? That's terrible! What if I get a powerful 
mage to fall in love with me? Could he do it?"
    
    "If he were close enough to the same kind of mage that 
you are, and sufficiently skilled, he could combine his 
power with yours and the two of you could hold the age of 
one of you for a few more years. But, again, you would have 
less power for anything else. Theodrick was holding a 
difference of about forty years at the end, and it took a 
team of mages to do it."
    
    "I knew you knew more about it than I did, if I could 
just get you to talk." Mari turned back to Alys. "If you 
came here in the hope of perpetual youth, I am afraid you 
are in the wrong place."
    
    Alys pouted, but her eyes were merry. "Neither of you 
are any help at all. If I can't stay young forever, I 
suppose I'll just have to enjoy myself while it lasts. 
Speaking of which _ ."
    
    She nodded in the direction of the next table, where 
Edwin and Jon were sitting, and winked at her friends. "I'm 
thirsty," she said, raising her voice. "If I fetch another 
pitcher, will you boys help me drink it?"
    
    Chapter 8
    
    The two girls were in the cookshop starting dinner when 
Joshua came in and walked over to the table where they sat. 
"May I join you, ladies?"
    
    Neither spoke; he took their silence for assent.
    
    "Do either of you care for anything to drink?" he said, 
looking at Mari. "The wine they got in last week is better 
than you might expect."
    
    She nodded. "Thank you."
    
    Ellen said nothing. In a few minutes he returned with a 
bowl of mutton stew in one hand, two clay cups and a small 
pitcher. He poured wine into the cups, handed Mari one, 
spoke over the background of voices and clattering dishes.
    
    "How have you been enjoying the lectures? Is Bertram as 
dull as he was my year? I got more sleep in that class than 
in my own bed."
    
    Mari took the cup, and looked up at Joshua. "He is 
rarely entertaining, but at least I can understand most of 
what he is saying. Sentence by sentence Magister Coelus 
sounds very interesting, but when he finishes I feel that I 
know a little less than when he started. I have no doubt 
that he is as brilliant as Ellen says, but unfortunately I 
am not." She drank a sip of wine, then put the cup down 
again.
    
    "Coelus? I don't know about brilliance, but he is not 
teaching anything useful. I don't want to know about basis 
stars, I want to know how to do magery. All the lectures are 
mostly a waste of time anyway; it's not until you get to the 
tutorials that you learn anything you can actually use." He 
watched Mari as he spoke.
    
    "I _ I suppose so."
    
    Ellen looked at her friend in surprise, then back at 
Joshua. Mari's face was faintly flushed.
    
    "And a boring waste of time. There are so many more 
interesting things to do." He was speaking to Mari; Ellen 
might as well not have been there.
    
    "Yes, yes, I suppose there are."
    
    "Down by the river bank it is very pleasant this time of 
the evening."
    
    Mari rose from the table, her wine cup still half full. 
"It was pleasant speaking with you," Joshua said to Ellen. 
"I will see the lady Mariel safe back to college."
    
    Ellen hesitated a moment, stood up, and spoke to Mari. 
"You look unwell. Do you have a fever?"
    
    "A fever? No. I don't think so. Not exactly." Her eyes 
never left Joshua's.
    
    "Let me feel your forehead." Ellen put her hand against 
her friend's forehead, closed her eyes.
    
    "Shall we be off?" Joshua started around the table, 
tripped, and came down heavily. In a moment he was up again, 
stepped forward, and stumbled again. He looked down.
    
    "Damn, the laces have tangled." He leaned over, 
carefully undid and redid his bootlaces, then stood up 
again. Mari gave him a look. "Shall we go now?" he said, a 
bit impatiently.
    
    "Go where? I haven't finished my dinner yet."
    
    "We were going to take a walk down by the river."
    
    Mari shook her head. "I think not. Perhaps some other 
day." She sat down again.
    
    Joshua glanced down at the table, up again at Mari.  "We 
still have some wine left. Before I go, a toast to fewer 
boring lectures, to successful spells, and your graduation 
as a wi_ as a mage of the college." He lifted his wine cup, 
drained it, still staring at Mari.
    
    Ellen picked up Mari's cup. "Since the toast is to 
Mari's success, we two should drink it, not she." She sipped 
from the cup, put it down, and looked up intently at Joshua.
    
    "Of course. Well, back to prepare for my next tutorial." 
He fled. Ellen sat back down again. Mari looked at her 
curiously. "That was very strange. What are you laughing 
at?"
    
    Ellen took a bite of her stew and, still smiling, chewed 
it thoughtfully. "It wasn't supposed to show." She swallowed 
and said, "I was laughing at Joshua trying to get out of the 
room before I fell in love with him."
    
    "Before you what?"
    
    "Before I fell in love with him."
    
    Mari inspected her friend's face. This was not her sort 
of joke. "There was something in the wine?"
    
    Ellen nodded. "A love potion, I think. I'm not properly 
trained as a healer, but mother taught me some useful 
tricks. Dealing with potions was one of them."
    
    "So that was why I felt so odd. I don't think love is 
quite the right word. I wasn't in love with Joshua. I just _ 
."
  
  "Wanted to walk down by the river among the willows, pull 
him down and tear his clothes off?"
    
    Mari nodded. "Two years ago I had a crush on one of my 
tutors. It was a little like that, but with parts missing. I 
wonder what he wanted."
    
    This time it was Ellen's turn to look surprised. "I 
thought that was obvious."
    
    Mari shook her head. "There are two whores in the 
village that I know of, one of them quite pretty. With 
easily a hundred single men in the college, they must get a 
lot of business. Joshua might enjoy seducing me, but in the 
long run there would be consequences _ . He can't be that 
stupid." Her face had gone pale, but her voice remained 
calm.
    
    She thought a moment. "Perhaps he thought if he could 
get me pregnant my father would let him marry me. He doesn't 
know Father! Lucky for him it didn't work; he should be more 
grateful to you than I am. I can't think what might have 
happened if you hadn't been here. I didn't think potions 
like that were included in what students here got taught. 
Didn't Magister Hal say something about them?"
    
    "They certainly are not included in what we are taught; 
love potions are a compulsion, in violation of the bounds of 
magery. Magister Hal discussed them in one of his first 
lectures. And if they were taught here, I wouldn't trust 
Joshua with making one; he'd be as likely to poison as 
seduce you."
    
    "He must have bought it. Lots of money and no morals_the 
perfect customer. It probably isn't the first time; he 
seemed so expectant."
    
    Ellen nodded. "I expect they're also against royal law, 
at least for what he was trying to do. Should we speak to 
Hal or one of the other magisters?"
    
    Mari shook her head. "Better not to have my name in a 
scandal. I will just have to be careful about drinking 
anything he offers me in the future."
    
    "That may not be enough. Potions are not all he can buy. 
You said you wanted to show me some trinkets you were 
thinking of purchasing from Master Dur's in the village. 
Will he still be open?"
    
    "I expect so. It's still light, and I don't think he 
closes until dark. But what _ ."
    
    "Show me whatever you like, but I want you to buy an 
amulet case. And let me look at it first so I can see if it 
will do."
    
    When they got to the jeweler's shop it was indeed still 
open. Inside they found Alys, pondering several necklaces 
and bracelets. The jeweler was in the back room of the shop 
tidying up after his dinner, having left a mug of beer 
behind him on the counter. Ellen and Mari looked over his 
wares; Mari commented in a low voice. "Mostly silver, and 
none of the stones are very valuable, but it's lovely work."
    
    "There can't be much of a market here in the village for 
expensive pieces."
    
    Mari nodded agreement. "He keeps a few in the back, for 
customers who look as though they can afford them. But I 
don't see why he is here working in silver and garnet when 
he could make far more in the capital doing the same work in 
gold and rubies instead. He's at least as good as mother's 
jeweler, maybe better. I must bring her here_perhaps she can 
commission something."
    
    Alys addressed Master Dur as he came back into the front 
part of the shop:
    
    "Could you help me with this amulet case? It seems to be 
stuck."
    
    He picked up the case, tried to twist off the lid; 
nothing happened.
    
    "It is stuck; I wonder how that happened. Let me see _ 
."
  
  He walked along the counter to where a small anvil was 
sitting, next to it an iron hammer.
    
    "This might do it." He tapped the amulet case gently on 
the anvil, turned it, tapped it again, again. This time the 
cap came off with a gentle twist. Alys gave the jeweler a 
startled look.
    
    "If it gets stuck that easily, I don't think I want it. 
Have you a sapphire pendant I could look at? I think the 
color would go with a dress I have."
    
    By the time the jeweler returned with a tray and several 
pieces, Mari and Ellen had agreed on an amulet case. Dur 
left the tray with Alys and came over to speak to them.
    
    "You plan to enchant it?" The question was put to Ellen. 
She nodded. "I assume that is its intended purpose?"
    
    "Yes. Virgin silver; I refined it from the ore myself."
    
    Ellen took the amulet case; Mari paid the jeweler, 
turned back to her friend.
    
    "Now I'm going to see what else I can find. You can stay 
and advise."
    
    Ellen shook her head. "I should be getting back. I have 
work to do." She glanced down at the amulet case. "I'll come 
by your rooms later this evening; you can show me what 
treasures you have bought then." Mari nodded farewell and 
turned back to the jeweler's wares.
    
    It was a good hour past vespers when Ellen knocked on 
Mari's door. Mari was at her desk inspecting her purchases. 
Ellen handed the amulet case to Mari, then sat down.
    
    "It looks just the same."
    
    "It is a pretty piece, but you won't be wearing it for 
looks. Wear it where it doesn't show, next to your skin. If 
you feel it getting uncomfortably warm, someone is trying to 
enspell you; if I am not too far away I will know. There is 
no way to protect you from everything, but at least we can 
be warned if Joshua tries a spell rather than a potion next. 
Now show me what other treasures you've acquired."
    
    "I must tell you what happened after you left. You 
remember that Alys asked the jeweler to show her sapphire 
pendants?"
    
    Ellen nodded.
    
    "I was a bit surprised. She doesn't wear anything that 
expensive, and I wouldn't have thought she could afford to. 
I wondered if she might be wanting to drop a hint to one or 
two of the young men she has running after her. But now I'm 
not sure."
    
    "What happened?"
    
    "After Dur got a few things for me, she called him over 
to complain of something wrong with the pendants. I went to 
look. They were nice work, mostly gold. You would expect to 
see valuable stones set in, but they weren't sapphires;  two 
were clear, like rock crystal, and one dark. Dur looked 
annoyed, as if he made a mistake in what he had brought out. 
He apologized, picked up the tray, and suddenly Alys 
screamed. I looked at her and her hair had caught fire. She 
was standing with her back to the fireplace at one end of 
the shop, and I suppose a spark must have caught it; you 
know how fine it is.
    
    "For an old man, Dur moved pretty fast. He dropped the 
tray on the counter, picked up his beer mug, and dumped it 
over her. It put out the fire but she was a mess_soaked with 
beer and half her hair burned black. She'll need a scarf 
tomorrow, and a haircut. But something felt strange about it 
all; first the stuck amulet case, then the sapphires that 
weren't, then the fire."
    
    "Yes." Ellen thought for a moment. "It must have been an 
accident, but I think Alys got what she deserved."
    
    "What do you mean?"
    
    "The stuck amulet case was her doing; I saw it. Before 
she put the cap back on she sprinkled something onto it and 
said something under her breath. I suspect it was the spell 
Magister Bertram told us about two days ago as a simple 
example of a union of similar materials. She probably got 
the powder from one of her older admirers with access to lab 
supplies. She must have been practicing it by trying it out 
on master Dur."
    
    "Why didn't it work?"
    
    "It did." Ellen was smiling.
    
    "Not for long. He got it loose with almost no trouble at 
all. Just a couple of taps."
    
    "It wasn't the taps, it was the anvil. The spell depends 
on the similarity of one piece of silver to another. The 
amulet and the top both tried to identify with the iron, so 
the spell collapsed. But I don't know why Alys was doing it. 
Did she think the jeweler would give her a discount if there 
seemed to be something wrong with it?"
    
    Mari shook her head. "I expect she was just trying to 
play a joke on the old man. After he gave up trying to open 
it she would have said the counterspell and left him 
wondering why it hadn't opened for him. She's mischievous, 
but I don't think she would cheat someone."
    
    "Well, the joke didn't end up being on him then." Ellen 
looked down. "I wonder if it was an accident. He must have 
been dealing with students from the college for a long time, 
maybe guessed what was going on years ago and asked one of 
the magisters how to counter such tricks, then amused 
himself by turning the tables on students like Alys. That's 
why I wonder_but I don't see how he could have _ ."
    
    "Were the sapphires another trick?"
    
    Ellen nodded. "Last week in Simon's language class, 
remember? One of the names we had to memorize was the true 
name of sapphire. She must have gotten someone to teach her 
an illusion spell. With that and the true name it would be 
easy to make the stones look different, at least for a 
while. I expect by now the spell has worn off and Master 
Dur, if he's had another look, is relieved."
    
    "And if he's used to students doing pranks _?"
    
    "He might have suspected what she was up to. He's 
probably at least as good as you are at guessing what 
customers can and can't afford to buy; it's how he makes his 
living, after all. But unless he happened to have a friendly 
fire mage in the next room, I don't see how he could have 
made her hair catch fire. Accidents do happen. Now, show me 
what you bought."
    
    Chapter 9  
    
    Coelus handed back the papers and gestured Ellen to the 
chair. "One careless mistake, two places where there is a 
more elegant solution than the one you found. I have marked 
them. See if you can improve your answer. One place where 
you found a more elegant solution than anyone I'm aware of 
ever has. I marked that too.
    
    "The question is what to do with you beyond lectures at 
the College. I will be happy to continue teaching you what I 
can. In particular, I would like to work through Olver's 
first treatise with you. It is a tantalizing piece of work, 
a signpost to the future of magical theory, and I'd be happy 
to have your view of it.
    
    "But doing problems I set, reading treatises that I 
assign, is not enough. It is time for you to start on your 
own work, learning things I cannot teach you because I do 
not know them.
    
    "Independent research is for select third year students. 
You are not yet at the end of your first year but, at the 
level of pure theory, you already understand more than half 
my colleagues. There is much you can still learn, but less 
and less left that I can teach you. At your age I too was a 
student, but it didn't stop me from starting my real work. 
There is no reason you should not do the same.
    
    "You do not wish to help me with my project. I do not 
agree with your reasons but I accept them. So you should 
have a project of your own, and perhaps more than one."
    
    "What sort of project, Magister?"
    
    He hesitated a moment, opened his tablet, looked down at 
the first leaf. "It is your decision but I have a few ideas. 
It could be either research in understanding something that 
already exists. Or research in creating something new. My 
advice would be to start with the first, and perhaps go on 
to the second later. I have a short list of puzzles here; 
you could choose one of them or find another for yourself."
    
    "What sort of puzzles?"
    
    "We have spoken a little about the stability problem_the 
tendency of constructions, static spells, to decay over 
time. One of the problems you did last week involved 
calculating the rate of loss for a simple static spell, and 
from that, the time to collapse."
    
    The girl nodded, said nothing.
    
    "I have long been puzzled by the stability of the 
containment sphere. I did some rough calculations a few 
years ago and concluded that either it was much stronger 
when it was built_and I could find no evidence of that in 
the records_or it should have collapsed years ago. You are 
better fitted than I to examine it, tease out its structure. 
So one project would be to redo my work more carefully and 
precisely, calculate how fast the sphere ought to be losing 
its fire, and, if you can, determine how fast it is fading, 
either now or using any old records there may be from which 
its past strength can be deduced.
    
    "It is a puzzle that will test your abilities. If it 
turns out to be too easy for you, there is another sphere of 
fire, a somewhat brighter one, whose continued brightness 
may pose a still more difficult problem."
    
    She looked puzzled for a moment, then smiled. "You mean 
the sun. I have wondered about that."
    
    "Yes. By Olver's calculation, it ought to have burned 
out centuries ago; that's one of the six puzzles he starts 
the thesis with."
    
    "Does Olver have a solution?"
    
    "Some day you might go and ask him. When I did, he told 
me that he wasn't willing to publish half finished work. 
Perhaps you would have better luck."
    
    Ellen shook her head.
    
    "The containment sphere will do for the moment. Do you 
want me to work it all out myself, or am I free to look for 
information from others more familiar with the 
construction?"
    
    Coelus shook his head. "It won't do you any good. Nobody 
here knows anything useful and I searched through the 
library years ago. If Durilil left any description of how 
the sphere was constructed, it is long lost.
    
    "But you are welcome to look. This is a project, not a 
test; there is no need for me to test you any more. In 
seeking truth, one uses what one can find."
    
    * * *
    
    "You're sure you want to risk it?"
    
    Maridon nodded. "You invented the Cascade effect and you 
are the only one who really understands it. If something 
goes wrong, you have to be here to fix the schema and try 
again. I do not.
    
    "Are all the preparations made?"
    
    Coelus looked around the lawn. Maridon had taken the 
center position with three mages arrayed in their appointed 
places around him. With himself in the fourth position as 
air, all four elements were there to start the Cascade. It 
should be easier than the earlier experiments, with the 
improved geometry and with all four positions held by 
elemental mages instead of some only by material symbols. 
Coelus was in reach of the core line of the first stage; his 
athame, newly sharpened, lay on the table by his right hand, 
its silver blade gleaming. With luck, if something went 
wrong _ .
    
    Maridon glanced at him; Coelus nodded. Everything had 
been rehearsed; this was it. One side of the lawn was the 
wall of the magister's wing, windows shuttered against the 
late autumn chill. The other was the inside surface of the 
containment sphere; at least if something did go wrong only 
the college was at risk. His colleagues, having advised him 
confidently that his absurd pooling schema could never work, 
would have no business complaining if it turned out to work 
too well. Idiots.
    
    "Ready."
    
    Maridon began the first invocation of the schema. Coelus 
chimed in on cue, then the other three. With eyes closed, 
Coelus could see the web building, woven with mixed lines of 
the elemental colors. For a moment it trembled, then froze, 
a solid four pointed star centered on Maridon, drawn 
everywhere in the Four Colors.
    
    Maridon spoke the Word. The Colors poured through him, 
up his right arm, out the outstretched hand from each 
finger, in a spreading web, further and further. One line 
pulsed, froze, a bright line of cold blue_a mage pulled into 
the web. A line twisted of blue and white. Again, this time 
a hair thin line_not a mage, but every drop of power 
mattered. Again. Again, until the air was filled with a 
spiderweb of lines.
    
    Maridon's face held triumph in part, in part something 
else. He half turned, pointed with his left hand. Coelus 
looked down; the silver blade of his athame was sinking into 
the grass, vanishing, only the handle visible. He tried to 
turn, willed the link broken. Nothing.
    
    Maridon pointed, one after another, at the other three. 
Cold lines from his fingers to them. They too froze. For a 
moment time stopped, save for Coelus's mind racing. No 
answer.
    
    Coelus watched, unable to move, as the most powerful 
mage in the world, the most powerful mage that had ever 
lived, walked slowly over to the wall of woven fire 
bordering the garden, the inside surface of the sphere 
protecting the college from the world, the world from the 
college. Maridon reached out with both hands, caught strands 
of fire, pulled.
    
    For a moment the weave held. Maridon said another Word, 
Coelus felt the shock and saw the others sway. For a moment 
the world darkened. Slowly Maridon's hands pulled apart. 
Through the widening gap, Coelus could see the elm tree just 
outside the dome, the barrier that no mage in the world 
could break. Until now.
    
    Maridon said a final Word. From his fingertips new 
strands spread, beyond the sphere. A million ordinary folk, 
each with his little magic to tap, thousands of mages.
    
    One of the new strands pulsed, hair thin, froze. 
Another.
    
    The third was a column of red, as thick as the mage's 
wrist. For just a moment Maridon was outlined in fire.
    
    The fire died. The gap it had poured through closed. 
Where Maridon had stood was nothing but floating ash.
    
     
    
    "You look tired; how is your project going? Have you 
solved the puzzle of the containment sphere?"
    
    Ellen had been up most of the night finishing the work 
she was about to hand in to Magister Coelus, but she was 
sure she looked better than he did, after the death of his 
colleague and the tense inquiry that had followed. She sat 
down without being asked, knowing he would follow suit.
    
    "Not exactly solved. This_she handed him a single sheet 
of paper_is my theoretical calculation of the rate of loss. 
It is not precise because I do not yet have the full 
structure of the sphere, but I do not think it can be high 
by more than about a factor of two. I assume no loss from 
the bottom half, earth being a good insulator against fire, 
and no net loss from the interior surface."
    
    "This," a second sheet of paper, "summarizes my 
empirical test of the theoretical work. I constructed things 
similar to the sphere on a much smaller scale_the biggest 
was four inches across_and timed their decay. The results 
fit within my estimated range of error.
    
    "This is the other half of the empirical work. I 
measured the actual loss from the sphere through a very 
small solid angle and then scaled it up accordingly. It 
comes out lower than my theoretical estimate, but within my 
margin of two."
    
    "This is my calculation of the pattern over time, 
assuming no additional support after the sphere was created. 
It shows how strong the sphere would have had to be forty-
seven years ago, when it was created, in order to be at its 
present level now."
    
    "And this"_she handed him the fifth and final sheet of 
paper_"shows what it would have taken Durilil to construct 
that strong a sphere. If we assume he was three times as 
powerful a fire mage as I am and doing nothing else, it 
comes to about twelve years; that is how long it would have 
taken to generate that amount of power. I assume that if he 
had spent twelve years constructing the sphere and doing 
nothing else, someone would have noticed and commented on 
it. And, of course, there is nothing in the early records to 
suggest that the sphere was eight times as intense then as 
now. If it was more intense it should also have been 
thicker. The stone footing at the entrance gate was built 
then and its depth matches the current thickness of the 
sphere. Not a likely accident."
    
    She pushed the stack of papers across the table to him. 
"The conclusion, as the treatises sometimes put it, is left 
as an exercise for the reader."
    
    He stared at her for a moment, looked down at the 
papers, then up. "I fear I am not at my best today, and I 
have less time to review your work than I would wish. I am 
still trying to understand the accident that killed Magister 
Maridon and am making less progress than I had hoped. Until 
I solve that problem I cannot continue the project, even if 
I could persuade any more of my colleagues to risk 
participating, but I will try to get to your calculations in 
the next few days. Assuming I do not find any critical 
mistakes_and I do not expect to_what is your conclusion?"
    
    "Either Durilil found a way of violating the laws of 
magic as we understand them or the sphere is being 
maintained by some substantial source of added power."
    
    "Such as?"
    
    "Such as us. The sphere contains the college, after all, 
and between magisters and students the college produces far 
more power than would be needed to maintain the sphere. 
Perhaps the makers found some way to tax us for our 
protection, to drain off a trickle of our power to keep up 
the sphere. I don't see how_but I thought you might."
    
    He looked up, startled. "You are suggesting that Durilil 
anticipated my current work by more than forty years, but in 
the form of a construction, not a mage pool?"
    
    "Your work is based on Olver's, on a treatise that was 
completed just two years before the sphere was constructed. 
If you think about it _"
    
    "It is an odd coincidence. You are right."
    
    "And we know Durilil knew Olver's work, because after he 
constructed the sphere _"
    
    "He went off searching for the Salamander. Olver's 
salamander, one of the essential elementals. It fits 
together. It may even be true."
    
    Coelus, to Ellen's considerable relief, no longer looked 
like death warmed over. He thought for a moment, eyes wide 
open and alert.
    
    "It is a fascinating puzzle, but it is your puzzle, not 
mine. You discovered it, you solve it. I cannot afford to 
shift to another line of research just now, and although 
this one is important I do not see how it can provide a 
solution, or even a clue, to the problem of what went wrong 
three weeks ago.
    
    He smiled at her. "I realize that if you do find out 
anything relevant to my main line of research you won't tell 
me, but I am willing to take that risk. Now go get some 
sleep and then get back to work and let me return to what I 
am supposed to be doing."
    
    She hesitated a moment before getting up, and returned 
his smile. "Good luck, or bad, whichever you deserve. Try 
not to get yourself burned up as well." She nodded to him, 
and left the room. It was a long moment before Coelus too 
rose, went through the door, into his workroom. There, he 
scribbled a brief note on the wax of the tablet that was 
open on the long table, and set to work.
    
     
    
    Mari intercepted the others outside of the lecture hall. 
"That was the last lecture of the semester and I survived it 
entirely due to Ellen's help. I may even have understood a 
few bits and pieces. She won't let me buy her anything, so 
instead, I'm inviting all of you to dinner at the inn as my 
guests. We're meeting at the front gate in half an hour."
    
    When the five students arrived at the inn, they were 
shown to a private upper room and seated at a big table with 
room for twice as many guests. A waiter brought a bottle of 
wine, bowls of soup, and a first course, a made dish of 
eels. Mari gave Jon a stern look across the table:
    
    "And if you know anything unpleasant about eels, please 
leave it until after dinner."
    
    He shook his head. "Don't know a thing about eels. Never 
grew any."
    
    Alys smothered a giggle and turned to Edwin. "I am going 
home for the break and have a place reserved in tomorrow 
morning's coach. Will you be keeping me company?"
    
    "It will be my pleasure. What are the rest of you 
planning?"
    
    Jon was the first to answer:
    
    "Home's a long trip. This time of the year they don't 
much need an extra pair of hands on the farm. Plan to stay 
in the College and catch up on my sleep."
    
    Alys gave him a sideways look. "Won't it be very dull 
here, all by yourself, with nobody but the magisters? Or do 
you know something I don't about who else is staying?" She 
looked around the table.
    
    Mari shook her head. "Not I. The family is spending 
midwinter a few days north of here, and I will be joining 
them. Ellen?"
    
    "I am going home, with my head full of things to tell 
Mother about. I've arranged to rent a horse from the Inn 
stable."
    
    "Isn't it terribly dangerous, riding all that way by 
yourself?" Alys looked almost alarmed.
    
    Ellen shook her head. "I'm familiar with the horse they 
are lending me, and it seems safe enough."
    
    "I didn't mean the horse. Who knows what could happen to 
a girl riding across the countryside with nobody to protect 
her?"
    
    For a moment there was silence. Mari started to speak, 
but didn't. At last Ellen broke it. "I got here safely 
enough on a borrowed horse; I expect I can get home the same 
way. It isn't as if there were a war going on, or a plague 
of bandits. It will be royal road most of the way, and the 
last bit is country I know. "
    
    She turned to Jon. "It will be quiet here by yourself, 
but there is always the library. I expect they keep it open 
for the magisters. I gather that some of them stay through 
the break."
    
    Jon nodded. "Yes, between the library and my bed I will 
manage to fill the hours well enough catching up with 
everything during the term that I didn't understand.
    
    He stopped a moment, then continued. "I spent part of 
last Seventhday reading about the history of the College. 
Did you know the building was originally a monastery?"
    
    Alys looked up from her plate. "I expect it's still 
haunted by the ghosts of the monks the mages murdered. I 
will have to stay awake tonight to listen."
    
    Jon shook his head. "According to what I was reading, no 
monks were murdered, at least not by mages. The monastery 
belonged to a declining faction of one of the Doray sects, 
back when they were losing out to the orthodox. It was 
abandoned twenty or thirty years before the founders took it 
over. Durilil and Feremund showed up with a plan for a 
college and moved in with their apprentices, magery, mops 
and brooms. It must have been a job to get it cleaned up and 
put back together. They started in the front part with only 
the two magisters and eight or ten students, and over the 
years gradually expanded."
    
    Alys interrupted him. "Our wing is in the front; I 
wonder if it's where the Magisters lived at the beginning. I 
might have been sleeping in Durilil's bed, for all I know."
    
    Mari put down her glass, took a moment to prepare a 
suitable response. "I've heard plenty of rumors about 
students in magisters' beds, but that's a new one."
    
    "Don't be silly; he's been dead for hundreds of years. 
Besides, most of the magisters are too old. The only one who 
might be interesting is Coelus, and the only student he is 
interested in _" She stopped, in response to Mari's glare.
    
    Jon stepped into the conversational breach. "Hundreds of 
years would take you all the way back to the Breakup, when 
Theodrick tore Esland out of the Dorayan League and made 
himself king. Durilil and Feremund died less than fifty 
years ago, and I believe Olver is still alive, though he 
must be very old by now. One of the magisters told me that 
back when he was a student, there was a painting of Durilil 
that used to hang in the lecture hall."
    
    Alys would not be diverted: "According to the rumors, 
which magisters am I supposed to be sleeping with?"
    
    Mari shook her head. "If I knew I wouldn't tell. The 
rumors were about second years using unconventional means to 
make sure they get to graduate. I doubt it's true though. 
When the magisters first decided to admit women to the 
College there was a lot of gossip from people who 
disapproved of the idea, didn't think women could be trained 
as mages. They suspected that the magisters had something 
else in mind. I expect this is just a remnant of that."
    
    The door opened to let the waiter back in. He carried a 
tray with a roasted capon and several small bowls, each with 
a different sauce. Conversation vanished while the students 
devoted themselves to the new course. After a bit, Mari put 
down her knife, turned to Edwin. "I know Alys lives in the 
capital. Is that where you are headed too, or do you go on 
farther? How long does the coach take?"
    
    "Two days to the capital. We have relatives there. I'll 
spend at least the night with them, then go on; I expect 
they can lend me a horse. It's another twenty miles and a 
good road all the way, so it should be an easy day's ride. 
But of course," he turned to Alys, "it is much less 
interesting without a beautiful lady to keep me company."
    
    Alys gave him a melting smile. "You could always stay a 
few more days with your relatives. There's lots to see in 
the capital. And do."
    
    "It is a thought, but I expect my parents will want to 
see me, at least to make sure the college hasn't turned me 
into some sort of sorcerous monster. They were not all that 
sure they wanted me to go, but my uncle persuaded them. It 
might be easier on my way back. And then you can tell me all 
the latest court gossip."
    
    Chapter 10
    
    Magister Simon looked around the room, cleared his 
throat. The students fell silent.
    
    "Last semester I taught you a little of the spoken 
version of the true speech; I expect you to learn more on 
your own. As you know, there are several word lists in the 
library, as well as two copies of the canonical version of 
the syllabary. You will want to give some thought to what 
words, and what syllables for building words, will be most 
useful, considering your individual talents and your future 
plans.
    
    "This semester you will be introduced to the glyphs that 
make up the written form of the true speech, used for 
scrolls and other written spells. Just as a word is made up 
of syllables, so a glyph is made up of elements. "
    
    Simon waved his hand at the board; writing appeared:
    
    Word(syllables)<_>Glyph(elements)
    
     "Just as the syllables represent a definition of the 
word, so the elements that make up a glyph define its 
meaning. Just as a word can be reduced to a single syllable 
and used in constructing another word, so a glyph can be 
converted into a simplified form and in that form function 
as an element in another glyph."
    
    As Simon spoke, the outline of what he was saying 
continued to appear on the board. He gave the students a 
minute to get it into their tablets before again waving his 
hand; the board went blank. He picked up a piece of chalk, 
walked up to the board, wrote a symbol: three vertical wavy 
lines. "Can anyone tell me what this is?"
    
    Jon, who had been watching closely, raised his hand; 
Magister Simon nodded to him. "Fire, sir. The element for 
fire."
    
    "Correct. The element for fire, but also the glyph for 
fire. As an element it can be used in constructing other 
glyphs, as a glyph it can be used in constructing spells. It 
also has one other use, although I do not know if any of you 
would have encountered it yet."
    
    He looked around the room. At last Ellen raised her 
hand. "In theoretical magic, it stands for the Salamander."
    
    She was rewarded with a nod from the magister. "Correct. 
Most of you will not encounter the symbolic use of the 
elementals until later this semester, or perhaps next year, 
but when you do there will at least be a few symbols you can 
recognize."
    
    He turned back to the board, sketched a simple circle, 
turned back to the class. "And what is this?"
    
    Jon again raised his hand, but this time Simon ignored 
him, gestured to another student.
    
    "Earth. The element and the glyph, just like for fire."
    
    "Correct." Magister Simon added to the board the symbols 
for air and water, writing the name of each underneath 
twice, the second time as a syllable in the true speech. "We 
start with these four elements, as mages have started for 
hundred of years. Suppose we combine them. What, for 
instance, is this?" He wrote two symbols: Fire and earth.
    
    Again Jon raised his hand. Simon looked around, saw 
nobody else, nodded to Jon. 
    
    "Lava, sir. Burning rock. Or a volcano."
    
    "Very good. Did you work that out yourself?"
    
    Jon shook his head. "It was in something I was reading 
in the library, sir."
    
    The magister gave him an approving look. "I am happy to 
see that at least one of you takes some interest in your 
studies."
    
    He erased the symbols on the board, replaced them with 
the symbols for air and water. "And this?"
    
    To his surprise, it was Mari who raised her hand. 
    
    "You have an answer, Lady Mariel?"
    
    "Mist. Clouds. Something like that?"
    
    "Correct. Both. Have you too been spending your spare 
time browsing the library?
    
    She shook her head. "No. But it seemed to make sense, 
after Jon gave his answer."
    
    "Very good. It does indeed make sense. It is the nature 
of the true speech, whether spoken or written, to make 
sense."
    
    Chapter 11  
    
    Ellen looked up at the sky. Almost dark; the gate would 
be closing in half an hour or so. Finding Mari again might 
take longer than that; Mari could find her way home alone.
    
    She was just passing Master Dur's shop when she heard 
someone calling.
    
    "Ellen. Come in. Quickly."
    
    Nobody was in sight, but the shop door was ajar. She 
stepped to it, looked through.
    
    At the back of the shop a figure slumped in a chair; a 
second was lying on the floor barely a foot away. She 
thought she smelled a faint odor of burnt meat.
    
    "Ellen." It was the figure in the chair.
    
    "I've been stabbed. Pull out the knife and weave 
together the wound."
    
    She hesitated.
    
    "You are a weaver. Weaving can heal. You must be quick."
    
    The voice was faint, but she thought she recognized it: 
Dur, the master jeweler who owned the shop and crafted its 
contents. He had spoken to her once or twice. But so far as 
she could remember, he had never heard her name.
    
    "Be quick."

    Coming closer, light from the open door showed her the 
handle of the knife protruding from Dur's side, the dark 
stain spreading below it. She put her hand hesitantly on the 
cloth. 
    
    "The skin. Working through woven cloth makes it harder."
    
    That made sense, however he knew it. She slid her left 
hand in through the front of the wool robe, up under the 
shirt, against the skin over the wound, fingers either side 
of the blade. She closed her eyes, felt her way into the 
wound. The pattern of the flesh either side was clear, and 
the abrupt break, iron where there should be flesh. Iron.
    
    "You can't work with the blade in. When you are ready 
pull it out, and be quick."
    
    She took a deep breath. With her right hand she groped 
for the hilt of the dagger, found it, pulled it out. One 
fair sized vessel had been cut; she knotted both ends. Crude 
but fast; knots were the first thing you learned. Then she 
worked her way along the cut, starting where it was deepest, 
weaving the flesh back together, matching the ends of the 
tiny vessels that the knife had severed. She reached the 
skin, felt it moving, knitting together under her hand. She 
let her perception sink back into the wound, undid the knots 
and wove the final vessel together. She stood up. For a 
moment the world spun around her, then came steady. She 
stepped back, almost tripped over the body on the floor. She 
bent down to look at it.
    
    "Don't bother; no healer on earth could help him now. 
The idiot thief didn't see me sitting here with my eyes 
closed and the door open. The idiot me didn't see him 
either. Until he stepped on my toes, panicked, and knifed me 
before I could kill him."
    
    There was a long silence. Ellen looked at the man she 
had just healed.
    
    "You're a mage."
    
    She hesitated a moment, sniffed the air again.
    
    "A fire mage."
    
    He nodded.
    
    "Useful for killing people. Not so useful for healing 
them. Give me the knife."
    
    She handed it to him. He slid down from the chair to a 
kneeling position by the corpse, drove the knife between two 
ribs deep into the body.
    
    "I don't want people to wonder what killed him. You had 
best get back to the College before they close the gates. 
Come again when you are free and we can talk."
    
    "And until then, you would rather I not _"
    
    "Until then, I would rather you not."
    
    He did not seem greatly concerned that she might go back 
to the college and inform the magisters that Dur the 
jeweler, unknown to them, was a secret fire mage. It would 
be easy enough for him to kill her and blame it on the dead 
thief; fortunately the idea did not seem to have occurred to 
him. She walked out the door, down the street in the 
direction of the path leading to the college entrance, and 
started to breathe again.
    
    Dur pulled himself back into his chair, closed his eyes. 
For a moment Ellen was invisible to him. He found her, with 
a thought thinned the barrier she had built around herself. 
She showed to his sight as a pale tower of woven flame. His 
side throbbed but, looking back at himself, he could see no 
more bleeding inside or out. Her mother would have done it 
faster and better, but it was, so far as he knew, the first 
time the girl had used her talent to heal a serious wound. 
After a time, he saw her reach the woven flame of the dome, 
pass into it through the gate.
    
    Opening his eyes, he pulled a strip of cloth from the 
top of the display counter, spilling several rings onto the 
floor. He dipped the middle of the cloth into the pool of 
blood by his feet, bound it tightly around his body with the 
stain over the wound. A minute to catch his breath and drop 
onto his knees on the floor, moving towards the hammer. 
Three sharp blows on the alarm gong. He considered trying to 
make it back up to the chair, decided against.
    
    It took only a few minutes for the street watchman_Dur, 
as the most likely target of theft, paid the largest share 
of his salary_to arrive.
    
    * * *
    
    On her way to her room Ellen suddenly remembered Mari's 
account of Alys at the jeweler's shop. Not an accident after 
all.
    
    A pity that she couldn't share the joke.
    
     

Chapter 12  

    "You wanted to speak to me, Magister Coelus? One of the 
porters brought me a note."
    
    "Yes."
    
    Ellen looked at him in surprise. His face was white, 
drawn, angry; she had never seen it like that before.
    
    "Did you do this?"
    
    "Do what?"
    
    He held out the wax tablets, open. They were blank. "My 
notes, observations from the past weeks of experiment, ideas 
for other approaches to take. I've been working on trying to 
figure out what happened to Maridon, how to keep it from 
happening to me next time I try the experiment. All gone, 
erased."
    
    She shook her head. "I didn't even know you used a 
tablet for your lab notes. We've been doing theory; I knew 
you did experiments but I don't think you ever showed me 
one."
    
    "Someone blotted them out last night. You are the only 
pure fire mage in the college. I doubt any of the others 
have enough fire, or enough control over it, to melt the wax 
without scorching the tablet. And you have told me enough 
times that you disapprove of my project."
    
    "I do. Perhaps if I had known what was in your tablets I 
would have erased them; I don't know. But I wouldn't have 
done it secretly then, and I wouldn't lie about it now."
    
    For a moment Coelus seemed to relax, then something else 
occurred to him. "Where were you last night?"
    
    "Asleep in bed, of course. Where else would I be?"
    
    "I don't know, but you weren't in your bed a little 
after midnight. I went to your door and looked through 
it_not with my eyes_after I found the tablets. There was no-
one there. You weren't in your bed. Whose bed were you in?"
    
    There was a sudden silence; Ellen's face turned as white 
as paper, whiter than the mage's.  "I do not think it is for 
you to put that question to me. As it happens, I was in my 
own bed."
    
    "I looked, I tell you. I know you well enough by now, 
veil and all. You were not there. Nobody was."
    
    Ellen reached out to the lamp burning on his desk, 
pulled out a thread of flame, drew it in a quick gesture 
down her body.
    
    "Close your eyes, Coelus, and tell me where I am."
    
    He looked puzzled, but after a moment his eyes closed. 
His voice was more puzzled still.
    
    "You aren't there."
    
    He opened his eyes.
    
    "That's impossible. How do you do it?"
    
    "With your eyes closed, how many people in the 
village_mages or not_can you see from here?"
    
    "None, of course; they are outside the dome. I'm inside 
it. The dome is _ ."
    
    He looked at her again, closed his eyes, opened them.
    
    "You have a way of blocking magic, like the dome?"
    
    "Very like. I've slept behind a barrier for three months 
now, ever since Maridon tried to kill me."
    
    His mouth fell open; it occurred to her that, for an air 
mage, he looked strikingly like a fish.
    
    "Since Maridon what?"
    
    "Since Maridon tried to kill me. I was not sure at first 
who it was or why, but he was the only decent earth mage 
here and the attempt was obviously earth mage work. After he 
tried to seize the Cascade and use it for his own power, it 
was obvious why. You must have told him that you told me 
about the effect; he wanted to be sure nobody knew about it 
who might persuade you not to give him control of the pool."
    
    Coelus hesitated, torn between two questions.
    
    "How do you know about the experiment and what happened 
to Maridon? All anyone in the college knows is that 
something went wrong with a spell."
    
    "It was obvious you would try to test the Cascade; why 
else were there three outside mages here, all guest friends 
of Maridon? I was behind the strongest barrier I could 
weave, watching. Do you think you are the only one who can 
see with his eyes closed?"
    
    Coelus shook his head, as if to shake off distractions.
    
    "You said he tried to kill you, months ago. Why didn't 
you say something? Why didn't you tell me?"
    
    "I did not tell because I had no way of proving it. I 
was a student, he was a magister; why should they believe me 
instead of deciding I was crazy and sending me home? I did 
not tell you because I did not know whether or not you were 
behind it. You and he were working together, he was an earth 
mage. You had good reason to want me silenced."
    
    She fell silent, looking defiantly at him. Coelus was 
silent as well, speechless. He drew several long, slow 
breaths.
    
    "You thought I would try to murder you, to keep you from 
telling people about the Cascade?"
    
    "It was one possible interpretation of the available 
evidence."
    
    "I couldn't try to hurt you." He hesitated, the moment 
passed. He gave her a weak smile. "Killing you would be like 
burning a library or smashing the only instance of a 
precision instrument." He hesitated again. "For one thing, 
you are the only person in the whole college I can talk to 
without feeling as though I need a translator."
    
    She nodded.
    
    "I know. I feel much the same. It is one of the reasons 
I have not killed you, which would have been the simplest 
solution. And not unjust, considering the scale on which you 
have violated, and intend to violate, the limits of magery."
    
    He looked at her indignantly.
    
    "You. Kill me? How?"
    
    "For a brilliant man you are sometimes very stupid. You 
know what I am."
    
    She turned, pointed at one of the unlit candles on the 
shelf above his desk. It went up in a blaze of flame; an 
instant later, where the flame had been was nothing but a 
faint mist of grey ash.
    
    
    
    The next morning was breakfast, Constructions, Ethics, a 
free hour, lunch. Two temptations: To skip Ethics or use it 
to hint at Magister Coelus' project, in the hope of getting 
the other magisters to stop it. She resisted both. Two hours 
would be enough, and Master Dur's shop was a few doors down 
from the cookshop. She had been considering the puzzle of 
Magister Coelus' tablets, and it had occurred to her that 
although she might be the only fire mage in the college, 
there was another one not far away.
    
    Ellen spent the next two hours in a hard chair 
pretending to be interested in the lectures. Guydo preferred 
to put his questions to the students who didn't know the 
answers_but not to women. That suited her well enough, 
especially this morning. Hal, as usual, turned to her every 
time someone else stumbled. She was tempted to raise it as 
an ethical issue outside of class; was it just to make her a 
target of resentment in order to keep him from having to 
explain the answers himself? But she thought better of it.
    
    Ethics over, she escaped from the lecture hall past 
Magister Hal's attempt to explain to an uncomprehending 
Joshua what was wrong with compulsions. She had no doubt 
what sort of compulsions Joshua was interested in, or why. 
Hal glanced up as she passed but she, looking intently down 
at the notes on her tablet, managed not to meet his gaze.
    
    Getting out of the College presented its own problems; 
the Magister Gatekeeper knew her. He might wonder why she 
should run off to town in the middle of the day. Instead of 
following the main corridor to the gatehouse and the front 
gate, she turned right into the student wing past her own 
door to the end of the corridor, through the small door 
there into a corner of the college's kitchen garden. It was 
bounded by a low brick wall, beyond that the curve of the 
inner surface of the containment sphere. She stepped over 
the wall, hesitated, remembering again what she had done in 
the small orchard.
    
    Ellen took a deep breath, walked up to the grey mist, 
eyes closed, let her mind sink into it, stepped forward.
    
    * * *
    
    The shop door was closed, the sign leaning next to it 
read "out to lunch." As she turned away, disappointed, it 
opened. Master Dur looked out, and beckoned her in.
    
    Two chairs, his own from behind the counter and the one 
reserved for favored customers, had been placed at a small 
table set with a glazed bowl full of stew, two wooden bowls, 
two spoons, a plate with a loaf of bread and a knife. Dur 
gestured her to sit. Spooning food into the bowls, he slid 
the plate of bread over toward her.
    
    Two sets of questions; she would start with the older 
one.
    
     
    
    "Three months ago, when Maridon tried to kill me in the 
orchard. It was you who used fire to wake me?"
    
    He nodded. "You were almost buried before I saw what was 
happening. Short of trying to get there with a shovel before 
you were swallowed up, I didn't see what else I could do."
    
    "Do you know how it happened?"
    
    Dur shook his head, waited. In a moment, Ellen 
continued. "I thought it might have been an accident, 
someone doing an experiment that went wrong. But I had 
gotten a note from Magister Coelus, who had offered to take 
me for independent study on a research project of his, 
suggesting we meet in the orchard at evening bell. I thought 
it a bit odd_why not the office? But he said something about 
colleagues gossiping."
    
    "More likely to start gossip if he's meeting with you in 
the orchard in the evening."
    
    "He might not have thought of that. I didn't think _ ." 
She stopped, looked down, cut a slice of bread.
    
    "That he had any improper intentions? Probably not."
    
    "It isn't as if I was _ ."
    
    "A striking beauty, like your friend Mari? Men have been 
known to fall in love with a beautiful mind. I expect Coelus 
could, although it might take him a while to notice. Was he 
in the orchard?"
    
    "No."
    
    "So it was probably not an accident. Not what I would 
expect of Coelus, and I doubt within his power anyway. Did 
you show him the note and ask if he wrote it?"
    
    "By the time I got free, it was gone."
    
    The two sat eating quietly, as if they had known each 
other all their lives.
    
    "Do you know about the Cascade project?"
    
    He nodded. "Part of the reason I am here. Ever since 
Olver published his treatise it has been obvious to anyone 
paying attention that things were going to change, and that 
some of the changes might be for the worse. The first big 
breakthrough in magery, three hundred years ago, gave the 
Dorayans the advantage they used to build the league and 
turn it into an empire; the gods know where this one will 
lead. Since the treatise Olver has published nothing 
important that is new and does not intend to until he has 
worked the whole thing out to his own satisfaction.
    
    "If anyone else were going to make a breakthrough, 
Coelus was the obvious candidate, ever since his third year 
when he finished his work on the formal elementals and 
submitted it as a thesis. I saw what it meant, even if none 
of the magisters did; I have been watching him ever since. 
Once he worked out the Cascade _ . I don't want to live in a 
world split up among warring mages, each powered by his 
troop of mage slaves. Nor in one where all magic, large and 
small, funnels through one pair of hands, not even if the 
hands belong to Coelus instead of Maridon."
    
    "So it was you who erased the tablets with his notes on 
them?"
    
    Dur nodded. "And some other things. I've been trying to 
slow the project without being too obvious about it. It 
should have occurred to me that he might blame you."
    
    "Yes. I thought by now he knew me better than that."
    
    "He probably does. Men don't always think with their 
heads."
    
    There was another silence, while Ellen finished the last 
of her slice of bread. Finally she looked up. "Who are you?"
    
    "You know my name. For the rest _ if you look inside 
yourself, you will find a knot, a lock. The key is my name. 
Use it."
    
    There was a long silence. Dur had finished the last of 
the stew and sat watching Ellen, who had closed her eyes. 
She opened them then, and smiled. He was the first to speak.
    
    "I'm sorry, love, but it did seem the only way, and you 
agreed. Too many mages in the college, and too hard to 
predict what they might do or how well you could protect 
yourself.  Or what they might learn from you. Forty years _ 
."
  
  "I know_now. You and mother agreed, and of course I did 
too. I don't mind, I'm just remembering the parts that were 
missing over the last few months."
    
    She got up, leaned over, gave her father an affectionate 
hug.