Well, it was time to pass some of that irritation back to the appropriate recipient.
'Sit down, and take out your notes,' Anigrel continued. 'You can take notes, can't you? Your mind hasn't gone so dull that you can't write your letters?'
The boy flushed again, and this time there was a flash of anger in the dark eyes. Good. He'd finally struck a nerve.
Anigrel waited while the boy took his seat at the small table just under the single window in the workroom, and took out the book of blank pages in which he was supposed to take notes while Anigrel lectured. Anigrel regularly inspected this book to be certain that the boy understood the lectures delivered to him—or at least understood enough to note down the salient points of each lecture. And to be certain the boy wasn't just doodling or writing nonsense.
'Power,' he began, pacing slowly back and forth while he spoke, 'and by that I mean magickal power, does not arise out of nothing. As you know, every Mage has his own personal reserves of power, and this is all very well for small matters, but for greater Workings, power must be pooled. This is part of every Mage's training, how to cooperate and meld the power each one holds into a greater whole. But even this is not enough to supply the needs of our City and its people. Therefore, in the distant past, the Arch-Mages discovered and learned to harvest a still greater source of this power.'
He paused in his pacing to glance aside at his pupil, whose head was bent over his book, his pen scratching diligently on the pages.
Well, regardless of how absentminded the boy was today, the information that Anigrel was about to give him should certainly wake him up.
'You know that every Mage has his own personal reserve of power,' Anigrel continued. 'But you may not have realized it is not only Mages who have stores of this power. All people have it, although of course they can never use it themselves.'
The boy looked up sharply at that. Anigrel smiled slightly. It was about time that the boy began to understand how the world really worked! Perhaps some inside knowledge would give him the motivation to succeed! 'Yes, you may well stare! Now, do you know why a Mage needs to learn how to share his power with others?'
Kellen shook his head mutely.
'Because, boy, only one born to the power of a Mage can resist someone trying to take his power from him, and he instinctively does so when he feels his power being drained from him. It takes training and will to overcome that instinct. The ordinary person, one who has no notion that he has this power, does not resist when it is harvested. And that is what we do, we Mages in the service of the City. Fully half of us spend all our waking time harvesting the power of our citizens to serve the City itself.
'Not, as you may have thought, in using our own little stores of power in long and involved spells that make the maximum use of tiny amounts of it, in order to do the work that we must. No, we constantly harvest the power of the people of the entire City, storing it, so that we need not deplete ourselves in order to do the work of the City.'
Rather elegant, he'd always thought; like an invisible tax. Take from the citizens to do the work that they insisted in having done: purifying water, destroying vermin, creating the Golden Suns that Armethalieh spent so lavishly in trade with the outside world. And if the Mages siphoned off a bit here and there to make their own lives easier, well, that was only fair. Nothing in life was free.
The boy gaped at him, as if he didn't quite understand what he had heard. 'You mean, you take it from them? Without asking? Without them even knowing?' he asked incredulously.
'And what would be the point of telling them?' Anigrel demanded sharply 'Half of them wouldn't believe it, and the other half would want to be paid for it, somehow—as if living in the City weren't payment enough. Ridiculous—they don't use it, they can't use it, they don't miss it, and if it weren't harvested, it would just drain away, accomplishing nothing. All things have their price, and the good of the City is paid for by the power of its citizens. Why should we deplete ourselves for them, when they can supply the power instead?'
'But—we should tell them, at least,' Kellen persisted, then shut his mouth as Anigrel frowned at him furiously. Had the boy no higher instincts at all?
'Stupid sentimentality!' Anigrel snapped. 'They are beneath us; uneducated, without the wisdom that knowledge gives to us; they are not fit to make decisions in this regard. Yet they are pleased to accept all the benefits that living within the walls of Armethalieh brings. They must pay for it somehow—just as they pay other taxes, this is a tax that they must pay to the Mages and the Council. That they do not know they pay it is irrelevant. Everything has a price. Everything. And that is the way that the real world works.'
KELLEN bent his head back down over his book and scribbled Anigrel's words down verbatim, hiding his unease as best he could. So this was how all the magick of the City was fueled! He was very certain now that none of the Mages ever used his innate personal power for anything except his own personal needs. Why should they, even though the Mages benefited as much as anyone else from all of the municipal magicks, when they could save their own power for themselves and use the power of the citizens instead?
The problem was, The Book of Moon seemed to say that whenever you were the one who benefited from magick, you were the one who had to pay the price. Maybe that was only true in Wild Magic, but Kellen had to
