The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic

fireplace. He gave it a series of blows with the poker, then turned stiffly, as though his back ached.

“I should start working on dinner,” Nora muttered, rising. Hirizjahkinis announced that she would rest before dinner. Aruendiel said something about not leaving Hirgus alone.

The kitchen was quiet and dim. The fire in the stove had burned low and drowsy. Adding a new log, Nora wondered which of the two magicians had set the papers on fire. They were Aruendiel’s; he might have felt entitled to burn them. But maybe Hirizjahkinis was angry enough to burn them simply because they belonged to Aruendiel. What would have happened, Nora thought, if the box hadn’t caught fire—and what were they fighting about?

She found a knife, sat down, and began to peel turnips in the half-darkness. The knife was a shadow in her hand, and she could barely distinguish the white skin of the turnips from their white flesh.

Without thinking, she turned her eyes to the candlestick on the table beside her and watched as it flared into light.

* * *

Dinner that evening was not as awkward as Nora had feared, at least at first. By some unspoken agreement, the Faitoren were not mentioned. Hirgus was bubbling with pleasure over the books and manuscripts he had encountered. Aruendiel, initially cantankerous, was gradually flattered into a reasonable simulacrum of cordiality.

“. . . and you have an unredacted edition of Piris’s Fruits of Hell! It makes all the difference to have the proper dosages, with poisons. And then, Torgin’s commentary on the Metamorphoses! I’ve heard about it all my life, but I’d begun to think that it was just a hoax, like that Rgonnish manuscript you were telling us about.”

“My Torgin is quite genuine.”

“Of course, I could see that at once, but how did you manage to get hold of it?”

“A present from an old teacher—one of Torgin’s students,” Aruendiel said. Hirgus beamed at him insinuatingly until he added: “Lord Burs of Klevis.”

“Lord Burs! Chief wizard to Tern the Sixth! Well, that goes back a bit. They won the Battle of the Chalk Hills together, didn’t they?”

“Not just that battle,” Aruendiel said, in a tone that was familiar to Nora from her own lessons, “but the whole southern campaign.”

“Marvelous! You were there? There was a famous engagement—the Rout of the Dogs, they call it.”

“I was Lord Burs’s aide-de-camp.” Aruendiel’s black eyebrows knitted together. “Yes, the Rout of the Dogs is famous, but almost no one understands the real significance—” Apparently, Nora gathered, Lord Burs had turned an opposing battalion into a pack of dogs and then introduced a bitch in heat onto the battlefield. “—more important, the Orvetian battle order was completely disrupted, and their morale—”

Hirizjahkinis caught Nora’s eye across the table and smiled. “In the end they must rely on a female, even in war,” she whispered. She was eating with a good appetite; there was no obvious sign that any recent disagreements with Aruendiel had dampened her spirits.

“There’s one thing I’ve been meaning to ask you, my dear sir,” said Hirgus, when Aruendiel had finished his analysis. “Your Lord Burs was a wizard, was he not? Like myself.”

“Everyone was, in those days.”

“So how did you train as a magician, eh? When did you acquire your expertise in simple magic?”

“Real magic,” Aruendiel said snappishly.

“Real magic, true magic, simple magic—the point is, how did you learn to practice it? I’ve taken a special interest in the history of real magic—you might not think it of me, but it’s true. One of my great disappointments was finding that I have absolutely no aptitude for real magic, so at one time, I delved deep into the study of its origins, thinking that I might find some way for even a talentless dullard like myself to practice it. Alas, I had to content myself with being an ordinary wizard.” Here Hirgus smiled, ivory teeth showing through the curls of his beard. “But what surprised me was how suddenly real magic appeared on the scene, and how quickly it became the dominant method of working magic. And from what I can tell, you, sir, were the first of the magicians.”

“There were several of us,” Aruendiel corrected him. “Micher Samle, Nansis Abora, Norsn—and we were not the first magicians, far from it. The most ancient magic-workers you can name—the Frogskinner, Nagaris, Rgonnish, the Master of Hons—all practiced true magic. It was only later, as men discovered that they could entrap or entice spirits to do their magical work for them, that they began to practice wizardry. It was easier—in some ways more powerful. Eventually wizardry supplanted true magic entirely; for centuries it was almost forgotten. We did not invent true magic, my friends and I, we rediscovered it.”

Hirgus leaned back in his chair and placed the ends of his fingertips together. “Very interesting indeed! Of course, those ancient magic-workers left very little in the way of written records. It is hard to say exactly what they practiced.”

“It is clear enough, if you are intelligent enough to know what to look for.”

“It is not so clear to me, but then I am a mere wizard! All right, assuming your theory is true, sir, how did you and your friends develop a working, practical knowledge of real magic?”

By the look on Aruendiel’s face, Nora thought that he might be considering whether to end the discussion by turning Hirgus into something small and voiceless. “We built upon the writings of the early magicians,” he said finally.

“But there is so little! Only fragments! Unless—” Hirgus held up a finger, half-teasing, half-admonitory. “Unless they left some writings that remain unknown, or mostly unknown? Perhaps some of those books in your library that I was unable to open today?”

Aruendiel raised an eyebrow and smiled very briefly. “That may be so.”

“Ah! Well, we all have our trade secrets. I hope someday I may persuade you to share a few more with me. I must confess my real motive: I have a book in mind, a history of magic—there has been nothing authoritative written since Kerenonna’s Annals. So there is a real need for a history that covers the appearance—or revival—of real magic and takes us up to the present moment, and I think that your recollections, dear sir, and perhaps your papers would be at the heart of such a history. I am not asking anything, not now”—Aruendiel was already shaking his head—“I am simply mentioning this project of mine. We will talk some other time about how I can best record your contributions to the development of modern magic.”

“By the sweet night, Aruendiel, I had no idea that this was in Hirgus’s mind,” Hirizjahkinis said, laughing. “And now I see why he so generously invited me to Mirne Klep this winter.”

“Any help that you can provide me with, my dear lady, would be much appreciated,” Hirgus said, the metallic threads in his beard glistening as he nodded. “I must say,” he added to Aruendiel, “that I am delighted to hear you acknowledge that wizardry has some advantages over simple magic. That is a theme that I hope to explore in my book, in a balanced way, of course. Wizardry, for instance, gives you far more control, in some situations, than simple magic. My new carriage”—Hirgus lifted his goblet and waved it vaguely toward the courtyard—“would have been impossible to construct with real magic.”

“There was a magician from Ou, years ago,” Aruendiel observed, “who made a carriage out of fire, and one out of water, too. He used no wizardry.”

“Ah, but we are speaking of my carriage, which is not simply a utilitarian vehicle, but a thing of beauty, too. You must have observed how it is decorated, the wonderful little faces, their clever expressions—all wrought in living fire. It’s the work of an artist. The best magician would be hard-pressed to duplicate it.”

“I see.” Aruendiel’s face was almost expressionless. “You have either found a very unusual fire demon or —”

“I do have a fire demon, but it is a different spirit who does the decoration. One of the palace sculptors in Mirne Klep, a young fellow, very talented. He was sentenced to die for knifing a man, so I bought the execution rights. Not cheap, but the result is well worth it, don’t you think?”

There was a pause. “I don’t understand.” Nora’s query sounded, to her own ears, as loud as a stone dropped into water.

“In some places,” Hirizjahkinis said quietly to Nora, “condemned prisoners are sold to people who wish to make special offerings to the gods—”

“—or sold to wizards who are too lazy or too incompetent to treat with demons or the other spirits that already exist,” Aruendiel said. “Who have to make their own ghosts to do their will.”