“Get to it, then!”
She glowered for a moment longer, then continued, “So everybody was very worried when I was growing up, and I heard a lot of stories about how terrible the Northerners were, and my parents were always talking about how everybody had to do everything they could for the war effort, and the king was always issuing proclamations about how Dria would fight to the last inch of ground and the last drop of blood, and all this stuff, and it was all exciting, and really scary, and I think it was a pretty bad way to grow up, but I didn’t have any choice, you know? So I was scared all the time, but I wanted to do my part, so I went and got tested at Dria Castle when I turned twelve, and they said I would make a good wizard, and the war effort always needed good wizards — we had much better wizards and theurgists than the Northerners did, which is why they didn’t win, even though they had much better sorcerers and demonologists.”
Kelder, seeing that this might actually lead somewhere, nodded encouragingly.
“So they signed me up as apprentice to a wizard who had retired from combat duty to train new wizards,” Irith went on. “Not in Dria Castle, up in the hills to the west. And he was a nice enough master, I guess, but he was older than anything, hundreds of years old, and he’d never married or had any kids or anything, so even though he knew just about all the wizardry there was, he wasn’t very easy to get along with, and he didn’t understand anything about what it was like for me, being a girl growing up like that.”
Kelder made a vaguely sympathetic noise.
“And I never really wanted to be a wizard anyway, and old Kalirin wanted to send me out to General Terrek on combat duty when I’d finished my apprenticeship, and he talked about my maybe doing research, but I knew that research wizards all get killed — I mean, they’re lucky if they last a month! And I hated it, all that fussing around with weird, icky stuff like lizard brains and spider guts and teardrops from unborn babies, and I mean, yuck! Who wants to be a wizard?”
Asha started to say something, and Irith cut her off. “Oh, all right, so it’s really great when a spell works the way it’s supposed to and everything, but there’s all that preparation and set-up and ritual first, and everything has to be just perfect — it isn’t
“Kalirin was your master?” Kelder asked.
“That’s right,” Irith agreed, “Kalirin the Clever. He’d been training wizards forever, practically — I must have been about his two hundredth apprentice.”
Kelder nodded. “So what
“Well,” Irith said, “do you know anything about wizardry?”
Kelder considered for a second or two, then admitted, “Not really.”
“All right, it’s like this,” she explained. “Wizardry, as near as anybody can figure out, works by tapping into the chaos that reality is made out of — and if you don’t understand that that’s fine, because I don’t either, that’s just what Kalirin told me. It does this by taking magically-charged symbols — stuff like dragon’s blood or mashed spider legs — and ritually combining them in patterns that break through into that chaos. Or at least, that’s what the wizards
Kelder nodded.
“And some of the spells take
“So...” Kelder prompted.
“
Kelder nodded; Asha looked slightly confused. “But then, if wizards can carry spells around like that, why...” she began.
Kelder hushed her. “Irith will explain.”
“Right,” Irith agreed, “I will. So, Javan came up with this, and he called it Javan’s Augmentation of Magical Memory, Javan’s
“Like what?” Asha asked.
“Like, you can only do maybe three spells with it, four if they’re simple ones, maybe only two if they’re big, complicated ones. You can store them away in your head — but while any of them are still in there, you can’t do any
Asha nodded.
“So that’s the First Augmentation,” Kelder said. “What’s the second one?”
“I’m getting to that,” Irith said. “So Javan had this spell, but it wasn’t everything he wanted, right? I mean, you could only carry three spells and they didn’t always work right, and it was a hard spell to perform in the first place. So he tried to come up with an improvement on it.”
“The Second Augmentation,” Kelder suggested.
“That’s right,” Irith agreed. “Except it wasn’t exactly an improvement after all, it’s just different. It lets you carry about a dozen spells, if you do it right, and you can use each one over and over, as many times as you like — but they
Kelder blinked. He thought that over.