Lesson of the Fire (24 page)

And if this town was run
by a magocrat I did not know?
That was a
dangerous path to consider. He climbed the damp rope
ladder.

“
Bran’ Halfin was the
first. We’ll remember always his wisdom.”
The words were spoken every Weardfest in Rustiford, naming all
nine residents whom Nightfire had taken.
And now Brand, a first-degree wizard, leads this town,
Tortz.

And he had taught at least
four others here. He had been gone nine years from Nightfire’s
Academy, which meant he could have trained apprentices by now,
following Bera’s Unwritten Laws.
But they
all speak with a mundane dialect.

What about the disguises when I first came
upon them? They wish to keep their knowledge a secret, which could
also explain the rural accent.

What patterns do my observations
suggest?

The warrior led him to another adobe
building. Brand was waiting for them outside the door. He saluted
Sven with his right hand.

“Thank you, Bui.” Brand smiled warmly at
Sven. “I have some soup, old friend.”

Sven’s eyes went wide as he realized what he
had been missing. “The Unwritten Laws! Brand, what have you gotten
yourself into?”

Brand sighed heavily. He held the door open
and beckoned. “I’m sorry for your rough treatment yesterday. As you
have already surmised, we have good cause not to welcome wizards
with open arms. Come inside, and I will explain.”

Sven obeyed grudgingly, not at all happy
with the circumstances of this meal.

If Nightfire even knew I was here, he might
not judge in my favor.

The soup was too hot to eat comfortably. He
ate it anyway, eager to get the formality of the meal out of the
way. “You offered an explanation,” Sven prompted when his bowl was
empty.

“You must have left the Academy quite
recently.” Brand’s eyes watched the fire lick the blocks of peat in
his hearth as he spoke. “Have you been to Rustiford?”

“Yes. They wouldn’t let me stay because of
what you and Tosti did when you came back.”

“Tosti was abusing his power,” Brand said
without evident emotion. “I only did what I had to do to keep him
from setting himself up as a petty magocrat. I only regret that
others were hurt as a consequence.”

“And the ravit war?”

Brand winced. “I can’t make that right for
you. I’m sorry. I had hoped to drive the ravits farther east, and
we did that. Not everyone thought it was worth the price Rustiford
paid.”

“It wasn’t,” Sven snapped.

“What would you have done in my place, Weard
… Takraf you’re calling yourself, now?”

“You kept your name at the end of your
apprenticeship?”

“Shed your old name with your old cloak and
choose a new one when you don the green?” He shrugged. “It seemed
pretentious, so yes, I kept my name.”

“In your place, I would have done as
Nightfire advised and taught the ones who wanted to be taught,
rather than making myself an educator magocrat.”

Brand smirked. “I tried that, at first. My
students got bored of learning math and reading when they had hoped
I would teach them to use magic. They ran out of patience, and soon
I had no pupils at all.

“I started going on hunting expeditions to
prove my magic was useful enough to be worth years spent studying
history and Middling Gien. I sold my magic to people in exchange
for time spent in my classroom. Some people grumbled, but your
father supported me. I think he knew it would be good for Rustiford
to have its own wizards.”

“He did,” Sven said. “The town we came from
had a magocrat. She treated us well, and it was only the war that
forced her to leave us at the mercy of Flasten’s slavers.”

“Yes. Exactly. Anyway, everything was going
pretty well until one of the hunting parties was ambushed by
ravits. They killed Yrsa Lutig, Sven.” Brand flushed in a mixture
of anger and embarrassment that spoke of the strength of that
relationship. “I didn’t think of the consequences. I went out alone
and used magic to kill the first group of ravits I found. Their
tribe retaliated, and soon Rustiford had a war. A lot of people
died, and most of Rustiford blamed me. They chose not to give
Nightfire a slave the next year.”

“That was when Tosti came back, and he made
Rustiford dislike wizards even more. You fought. People died. Brita
decided enough was enough.” Sven spoke quickly, impatiently. “I
asked for an explanation, not a saga.”

Brand’s eyes blazed a little at Sven’s tone.
“If you’d have a little patience, I’m getting to it.”

Sven waved him on.

“After Rustiford, I gave up on doing it
Nightfire’s way. I picked a town beyond the duxies and offered to
teach them magic. Instead of teaching them to read, I taught them
to make torutsen. Instead of teaching them history, I showed them
how to wield Energy and Power.”

“You broke the Law,” Sven said flatly.

“I broke the Law,” Brand said, “because it
makes no sense.”

“It makes plenty of sense,” Sven countered.
“As with the ravits, you didn’t think of the consequences of giving
magic to the people of Tortz.”

“The Mass?” Brand asked with an incredulous
laugh. “That’s a lie told by wizards to ensure they stay in power.
Weard Darflaem taught magic to anyone who wanted to learn, and some
of his own students killed him for it.”

“The Mass wasn’t the first thing that came
to mind,” Sven said airily. He spoke in earnest. “Even if the Mass
isn’t real, Nightfire certainly is. Whether you agree with the Law
or not, the wizards will punish you if they catch you breaking
it.”

“I am well aware of that.”

“Of course. That’s why you have your prison.
How many wizards have you killed so far to protect your
secret?”

Brand hesitated.

Sven continued before the other wizard could
reply. “Wizards usually serve another wizard, and those wizards
ultimately serve a dux. One day someone will send a search
party.”

“There are many dangers on the Morden
Moors,” Brand said carefully. “It is not always possible to recover
a body.”

“But multiple disappearances in the same
part of the moors? Eventually, someone will take notice. They’ll
send a dozen wizards to investigate. And if you kill them, it will
bring even more.”

“Enough!” Brand growled. “Few wizards come
to Tortz. We’ve only had to kill three, and two of them were
slavers, so pardon me if I don’t weep over them.”

What about the
third?
Sven thought, but he said
nothing.

“The others leave none the wiser. We don’t
exactly show off our magic when we have guests.”

“You certainly didn’t hesitate when you
spotted me.”

“You scouted Tortz with Knowledge. We had no
way of knowing what you were looking for, but we didn’t want to
take a chance that you were looking for illegal magic-wielders.
Even then, we would have just driven you off if you hadn’t called
the myst.”

“If I had been an agent of Flasten, you
never would have gotten close enough to keep me from escaping. You
met me too far from your town walls. I already suspected a
wizard.”

Brand nodded his acknowledgment of the
point. “That’s certainly a more rational reason than I expected. I
was all set with a counter example to the ‘dangerous tool’
argument.”

“Magic is a dangerous tool, and giving it to
mundanes who don’t have enough knowledge to wield it wisely only
puts their lives in danger,” Sven summarized. “And your response
would involve the knife you’ve carried since you were a child — a
tool whose utility outstrips the danger involved in carrying
it.”

“I’ve always been fond of the fire variant,
actually, but yes.” Brand grinned as though Sven was an honored
guest and not a prisoner held captive with morutsen.

Sven hadn’t forgotten that detail, but he
had missed the company of other wizards since leaving Nightfire’s
Academy. He had enjoyed the heated debates over theory and practice
where the best arguments won out, and no one had any hard feelings
about being proven wrong.

He shook his head. “This is a real mess. You
can’t exactly un-teach them magic, and even if they swore off using
it until they had the knowledge, the wizards wouldn’t care. Under
the Law, this is a capital offense for everyone in the town.”

Brand looked at him hard. “What brought you
here?”

Sven, certain that evasion of any sort would
result in more suspicion, took a deep breath and began. “I have
been systematically aiding towns, villages and homesteads on the
Morden Moors. My assistance comes in the form of healing,
sanitation, reconnaissance and parasite removal.”

“And what do you demand in exchange?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

Sven shrugged and spread his hands.
“Education is simply one more service I offer. I started by proving
how useful magic can be. I keep them safe, and they have more time
for luxuries like learning.”

“And how many villages are under your
protection?”

“A few spans ago we added our fortieth.”

“Forty towns!” Brand breathed. “And do you
have other wizards helping you?”

“No. One green is unlikely to take orders
from another. Erbark helps where he can.”

“Apprentices?”

Sven wasn’t sure where this line of
discussion was going, but he liked it less and less. “A couple.
None ready for torutsen, yet.”

“How can you possibly protect so many
without any help?”

Sven smiled mysteriously. “I’ve had to
become very efficient.”

“Dinah’s shriveled teat! There has to be
more to it than that.” Brand waved a finger at him. “You’re hiding
something from me.”

“Yes, I am,” Sven admitted in a flat tone.
“I think you can understand why.”

Brand rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I have
been in Tortz for less than three years, and I no longer need to
maintain the spells protecting this town, but you already know how
I did it.”

Sven shrugged. “Even if you knew my secret,
you can’t expand beyond the walls of Tortz for fear you will be
discovered by the wizards.”

“What if you die before any of your
apprentices become wizards? Who will renew your spells? No one. And
the lives of every person in those forty villages will be worse
than they were before your arrival, because they will remember a
better time. Everything you have done will come to nothing.”

Sven considered arguing the point. The
villages worked together now, but it would be harder without their
only wizard. He waited for an opening.

“You go into the wizards’ garden and pick
its fruits for those villages, but you refuse to give them the key
to the garden’s gate. You will take the key with you to your grave,
and then the fruits will cease to arrive.”

“A colorful metaphor, Brand, but you’ve done
even worse to Tortz. You may be elevating a few Mar from their
mundanity, but the education you have given them is still far
inferior to that of a wizard, and wizards are the opponents you
will undoubtedly face once your crime is discovered, and you know
it will eventually be discovered. Your handful of mundanes, while
adept at a few applications, is not numerous or powerful enough to
fight a force of true wizards.”

“The wizards won’t necessarily discover my
adepts.”

“Oh no, this is much worse than that,” Sven
assured him. “What is magic? It is an abstract energy form
composed, to the appearance of one under the effects of torutsen,
of eight concrete parts, none of whose function is discernable to
the eye. A physical tool’s purpose can generally be intuited
quickly and with minimal experimentation. Unless the student knows
the name and the color of each variety of myst, he must, in
essence, reinvent the canoe. Moreover, unlike a physical tool, any
application he discovers but does not pass on leaves no evidence of
it ever having existed. Thus, magical knowledge gained without a
reliable means of recording that knowledge is easily lost and, even
in the best possible scenario, only very gradually increases. This
is precisely why literacy and the development of a rational mind
are so essential to the learning of magic.”

Brand considered this for a long minute.
“You’re right,” he said, at last. “I have been thinking in years
when I should be thinking in decades, in generations.”

Sven said nothing. He had the sense that he
was no longer in danger of being murdered, but his chances of being
executed for breaking the Unwritten Laws were rising by the
minute.

I should turn him over to
Nightfire for judgment
.
It is the only way to avoid being Brand’s accomplice. If I so
much as keep my silence about Tortz, I will be
complicit.

“Secret or no secret, you must have
difficulty finding time to teach your apprentices with forty towns
to defend,” Brand said conversationally, and Sven knew the renegade
wizard had seen right through him.

He could already tell the
course the conversation would take, the observations, the offers of
compromise. And he knew he could refuse none of it. He had
stretched himself too thin, and he needed Brand’s help every bit as
much as Brand needed his.
No, even more
than he needs mine.

“In that I fear you are correct,” Sven said,
jaw tight.

“I propose a compromise. Teach me your
secret. I will renew the defenses of your Protectorates if you will
stay in Tortz to teach my apprentices. Perhaps we can cover up my
legal indiscretion before it is brought to light. Once they are
wizards, they can teach the people of your benevolent little
duxy.”

Sven hesitated.
What if the magocrats find me in Tortz? They
would hold me responsible for Brand’s offense and might not believe
me if I implicated him. In my absence, Brand could claim the
Protectorates as his own. And will the wizards of Tortz be loyal to
Brand or to the ideals he shares with me? Brand could seize control
of the Protectorates that way, too.