Nine: Magic for Idiots and English Majors
Slowly summer came to an end. The air grew cooler and the trees began to change. Standing on the battlements Wiz could watch flocks of birds winging their way over the multi-color patchwork tapestry of the Wild Wood. The swallows no longer flitted about in the evenings and the nights bore a touch of frost.
The garden was harvested now and Moira and Shiara spent their days in the kitchen, salting, pickling, preserving and laying by. Wiz helped where he could in the kitchen or out in the garden where Ugo was preparing the earth for its winter’s rest.
In some ways Wiz was more at home in the kitchen than Moira. The way of preserving that the hedge witch knew relied heavily on magic. But for Shiara’s comfort there could be no magic in the kitchen at Heart’s Ease.
“These will not be as good as if they were kept by a spell, but we will relish them in deep winter nonetheless,” Moira said one afternoon as they chopped vegetables to be pickled in brine.
“Yeah,” said Wiz, who had never particularly liked sauerkraut. “You know on my world we would can most of this stuff. Or freeze it.”
“Freezing I understand, but what is canning?”
“We’d cook the vegetables in their containers in a boiling water bath and then seal them while they were still very hot. They’d keep for years like that.”
“Why cook them before you sealed them?”
“To kill the bugs.” He caught the look on her face. “Germs, bacteria, tiny animals that make food spoil.”
“You know about those too?” Moira asked.
“Sure. But I’m surprised you don’t think disease is caused by evil spells.”
“I told you that there is no such thing as an evil spell,” Moira said, nettled. “And some ills are caused by spells. But most of them are the result of tiny creatures which can infest larger living things. What I do not understand is how you can sense them without magic.”
“We can see them with the aid of our instruments. We have optical and electron microscopes that let us watch even viruses—those are the really tiny ones.”
“You actually see them?” Moira shook her head. “I do not know, Sparrow. Sometimes I think your people must be wizards.”
“I’m not.”
Moira bit her lip and turned back to her cutting.
As evenings lengthened the three of them took to sitting around the fireplace in the hall enjoying the heat from the wood Wiz had cut. Usually Moira would mend while Wiz and Shiara talked.
“Lady, could you tell me about magic?” Wiz asked one evening.
“I don’t know many of the tales of wonders,” Shiara said. She smiled ruefully. “The stories are the work of bards, not the people who lived them.”
“I don’t mean that. What I’m interested in is how magic works. How you get the effects you produce.”
Moira looked up from her mending and glared. Shiara said nothing for a space.
“Why do you want to know?” She asked finally.
Wiz shrugged “No reason. We don’t have magic where I come from and I’m curious.”
“Magic is not taught save to those duly apprenticed to the Craft,” Moira scolded. “You are too old to become an apprentice.”
“Hey, I don’t want to make magic, I just want to know how it works, okay?” They both looked at Shiara.
“You do not intend to practice magic?” she asked.
“No, Lady.” Wiz said. Then he added: “I don’t have the talent for it anyway.”
Shiara stroked the line of her jaw with her index finger, as she often did when she was thinking.
“Normally, it is as Moira says,” she said at last. “However there is nothing that forbids merely discussing magic in a general fashion with an outsider—so long as there is no attempt to use the knowledge. If you will promise me never to try to practice magic, I will attempt to answer your questions.”
“Thank you, Lady. Yes, I will promise.”
Shiara nodded. Moira sniffed and bent to her mending.
###
After that Wiz and Shiara talked almost every night. Moira usually went to bed earlier than they did and out of deference to her feelings they waited until she had retired. Then Wiz would try to explain his world and computers to Shiara and the former wizardess would tell Wiz about the ways of magic. While Shiara learned about video-game-user operating systems, Wiz learned about initiation rites and spell weaving.
###
“You know, I still don’t understand why that fire spell worked the second time,” Wiz said one evening shortly after the first hard frost.
“Why is that, Sparrow?” Shiara asked.
“Well, according to what Moira told me, I shouldn’t have been able to reproduce it accurately enough to work. She said you needed to get everything from the angle of your hand to the phase of the moon just right and no one but a trained magician could do that.”
Shiara smiled. “Our hedge witch exaggerates slightly. It is true that most spells are impossible for anyone but a trained magician to repeat, but there are some which are insensitive to most—variables?—yes, variables. The coarse outlines of word and gesture are sufficient to invoke them. Apparently, you stumbled across such a spell. Although I doubt a spell to start forest fires would be generally useful.”
Wiz laughed. “Probably not. But it saved our bacon.”
“You know, Sparrow, sometimes I wonder if your talent isn’t luck.”
Wiz sobered. “I’m not all that lucky, Lady.”
The former sorceress reached out and laid her hand on his. “Forgive me, Sparrow,” she said gently.
Wiz moved to change the subject. “I can see why it takes a magician to discover a spell, but why can’t a non-magician use a spell once it’s known?”
“That is not the way magic works, Sparrow.”
“I know that. I just don’t understand why.”
“Well, some spells, the very simple ones, can be used by anyone—although the Mighty discourage it lest the ignorant be tempted. But Moira was basically correct. A major spell is too complex to be learned properly by a non-magician. A mispronounced word, an incorrect gesture and the spell becomes something else, often something deadly.” Her brow wrinkled. “Great spells often take months to learn. You must study them in parts so you can master them without invoking them. Even then it is hard. Many apprentices cannot master the great spells.”
“What happens to them?”
“The wise ones, like Moira, settle for a lesser order. Those who are not so wise or perhaps more driven persevere until they make a serious mistake.” She smiled slightly. “In magic that is usually fatal.”
Wiz thought about what it would be like to work with a computer that killed the programmer every time it crashed and shuddered.
“But can’t you teach people the insensitive spells?” he asked. “The ones that are safe to learn?”
Shiara shrugged. “We could, I suppose, but it would be pointless. Safe spells are almost always weak spells. They do little and not much of it is useful. Your forest fire spell was unusual in that it was apparently both insensitive and powerful. There are a very few exception but in general the spells that are easy to learn do so little that no one bothers to learn them, save by accident.”
“Well, yeah, but couldn’t you build on that? I mean start from the easy spells and work up to the harder ones that do something useful?”
Shiara shook her head. “Once again, magic does not work that way. Mark you, Sparrow, each spell is different. Learning one spell teaches you little about others. Wizardry is a life’s work, not something one can practice as a side craft. You must start very young and train your memory and your body before you begin to learn the great magics.”
“I see the problem,” Wiz said.
“That is only the beginning. Even if ordinary folk could learn the great spells, we would be cautious about teaching them lest they be misused. A wizard has power, Sparrow. More power than any other mortal. By its very nature that power cannot be easily checked or controlled by others. Few have the kind of restraint required to do more good than harm.”
“But more people are dying because, only wizards can use the really powerful spells,” Wiz protested, thinking of Lothar and his cottage in the Wild Wood.
“More would die if those who are not wizards tried to use them. Life is not fair, Sparrow. As you know.”
Wiz didn’t pursue the matter and their talk went on to other things. But it troubled him for the rest of the evening.
Shiara’s right, he thought as he drifted off to sleep that night. You can’t have just anyone working magic here. It would be like giving every user on the system supervisor privileges and making them all write their own programs in machine language. Not even assembler, just good old ones and zeroes. He sleepily turned the notion over in his mind, imagining the chaos that would cause in a computer center. You can’t trust users with that kind of power. God, you don’t even want most programmers writing in assembler. You make them use high-level languages.
A vagrant thought tugged at the edge of Wiz’s sleep-fogged brain. A computer language for magic?
My God! I’ll bet you could really do that!
He sat bolt upright. Well why not? A computer language is simply a formalism for expressing algorithms and what’s a magic spell but an algorithm?
If it did really work that way the possibilities were mind-boggling. You’d need the right language, of course, but God what you could do with it.
These people were the original unstructured programmers. They were so unstructured they didn’t even know they were programming. They just blundered around until they found something that worked. It was like learning to program by pounding randomly on the keyboard. They never seemed to generalize from one spell to another. They needed some land of language, something to let them structure their magic.
It would have to be something simple, Wiz decided. A language and an operating system all in one. Probably a very simple internal compiler and a threaded interpreted structure. And modular, yes, very modular.
Forth with object-oriented features? Yep, that made sense. All thought of sleep vanished as Wiz got out of bed. His mind was full of structural considerations.
He dug a chunk of charcoal out of the fireplace and started sketching on the hearth by the wan moonlight. Just a basic box diagram, but as he sketched, he became more and more excited.
A Forthlike language was about the simplest kind to write. Essentially it was nothing but a loop which would read a command, execute it and go on to read the next command. The thing that made such languages so powerful was that the command could be built up out of previously defined commands. MOBY could be defined as command FOO followed by command BAR. When you gave the loop, the interpreter, the command MOBY, it looked up the definition in its dictionary, found the command FOO, executed it, went on to the command BAR and executed it, thus executing the command MOBY.
At the top of a program was nothing but a single word, but that word was defined by other words, which were defined by other words, all the way back to the most basic definitions in terms of machine language—or whatever passed for machine language when the machine was the real world.
The more Wiz thought about that, the better he liked it Forth, the best-known example of the genre, had been originally written to control telescopes and Forth was a common language in robotics. It had the kind of flexibility he needed and it was simple enough that one person could do the entire project. That Forth is considered, at best, decidedly odd by most programmers didn’t bother Wiz in the slightest. The critical question was whether or not a spell could call other spells. The way Shiara had used a counting demon to trigger the destruction spell in her final adventure implied that it could, but the idea seemed foreign to her.
He sat on the hearth, sketching in the pale moonlight until the moon sank below the horizon and it became too dark to see. Reluctantly he made his way back to bed and crawled under the covers, his excitement fighting his body’s insistence on sleep.
Nothing fancy, he told himself. He would have to limit his basic element to those safe, insensitive spells Shiara had mentioned. So what if they didn’t do much on their own? Most assembler commands didn’t do much either. The thing that made them powerful was you could string them together quickly and effectively under the structure of the language.
Oh yes, debugging features. It would need a moby debugger. Bugs in a magic program could crash more than the system.
It’s a pity the universe doesn’t use segmented architecture with a protected mode, Wiz thought to himself as he drifted off. As he was slipping into unconsciousness, he remembered one of his friend Jerry’s favorite bull session raps. He used to maintain that the world was nothing but an elaborate computer simulation. “All I want is a few minutes with the source code and a quick recompile,” his friend used to tell him.
He fell asleep wondering if he would get what Jerry had wanted.
###
All through the next day Wiz’s mind was boiling. As he chopped wood or worked in the kitchen he was mentally miles away with dictionaries and compiler/interpreters. He didn’t tell Moira because he knew she wouldn’t like the notion. For that matter, he wasn’t sure Shiara would approve. So when they were sitting alone that evening he broached the subject obliquely.
“Lady, do you have to construct a spell all at once?”
“I am not sure I know what you mean, Sparrow.”
“Can’t you put parts of simple spells together to make a bigger one?”
Shiara frowned. “Well, you can link some spells together, but . . .”
“No, I mean modularize your spells. Take a part of a spell that produces one effect and couple it to a part of a spell that has another effect and make a bigger spell.”
“That is not the way spells work, Sparrow.”
“Why not?” Wiz asked. “I mean couldn’t they work that way?”
“I have never heard of a spell that did,” the former wizardess said.
“Wouldn’t it be easier that way?” he persisted.
“There are no shortcuts in magic. Spells must be won through hard work and discipline.”
“But you said—”
“And what I said was true,” Shiara cut him off. “But there are things which cannot be put into words. A spell is one, indivisible. You cannot break it apart and put it back together in a new guise any more than you can take a frog apart and turn it into a bird.”
“In my world we used to do things like that all the time.”
Shiara smiled. “Things work differently in this world, Sparrow.”
“I don’t see why,” Wiz said stubbornly.
Shiara sighed. “Doubtless not, Sparrow. You are not a magician. You do not know what it is like to actually cast spells, much less weave them. If you did it would be obvious.”
###
Wiz wasn’t sure who had said, “Be sure you’re right and then go ahead,” but that had been his motto ever since childhood. The stubborn willingness to go against common opinion and sometimes against direct orders, had gotten him the reputation for being hard to manage, but it had also made him an outstanding programmer. He was used to people telling him his ideas wouldn’t work.
Most of the time they were wrong and Wiz had always enjoyed proving that. In this case he knew he was right and he was going to prove it.
All the same, he didn’t want anyone to know what he was up to until he was sure he could make it work. The thought of Moira laughing at him was more than he could bear.
Just inside the Wild Wood, perhaps two hundred yards from the keep of Heart’s Ease, was a small log hut. From the stuff on the floor Wiz suspected it had been used to stable horses at one time. But there were no horses here now and the hut was long deserted. Wiz cleared out the debris and dragged a rude plank bench which lay in a corner under the window. There was a mouse nest in another corner, but he didn’t disturb that.
The next problem was writing materials. This world apparently wasn’t big on writing, at least there weren’t any books in Heart’s Ease. The usual material was parchment, but he didn’t have any. Finally he settled on shakes of wood split from the logs in the woodpile and wrote on them with charcoal.
Fundamentally, a computer language depended on three things. It had to have some method for storing and recalling data and instructions, instructions had to be able to call other instructions and it had to be able to test conditions and shift the flow of control in response to the results. Given those three very simple requirements, Wiz knew he could create a language.
His first experiment would just be to store and recall numbers, he decided. He wanted something useful, but he also wanted something that would be small enough not to be noticed, even here in the quiet zone. Besides, if magic hurt Shiara he did not want to make detectable magic.
Drawing on what Shiara had told him, he put together something very simple, even simpler than the fire spell he had discovered by accident.
Although the spell was simple, he labored over it for an entire day, checking and rechecking like a first-year computer science student on his first day in the computer lab.
Late that afternoon he picked up a clean slab and a piece of charcoal. His hand was shaking as he wrote 1 2 3 in large irregular characters on the wood. Then he very carefully erased the numbers leaving only a black smear.
“Remember,” he said and passed his hand over the board. There was a stirring shifting in the charcoal and the individual particles danced on the surface like an army of microscopic fleas. There, stark against the white of newly split wood, appeared 12 3.
“Son of a bitch!” Wiz breathed. “It worked.”
He stared at the reconstituted numbers for a long time, not quite believing what he had done. He repeated the experiment twice more and each time the characters or designs he scrawled on the board and erased reappeared on command.
Okay, the next step is a compare spell. In IF-THEN. For that I’ll need . . . Then he started as he realized how late it had gotten. He still hadn’t cut wood for the next day and it was almost time for dinner.
For a moment the old fascination and new sense of responsibility warred in his breast. Then he reluctantly put down the board and started back to the keep. If I don’t show up soon, someone is likely to come looking for me, he thought. Besides, they’ll need wood for tomorrow.
No one seemed to notice his absence or made any comment when he disappeared the next day after his stint at the woodpile. The comparison spell also proved to be straightforward. The final step was the calling spell, the spell that would call other spells. That was the key, Wiz knew. If it worked he had the beginnings of his language.
Again, Wiz worked slowly and carefully, polishing his ideas until he was sure he had something that would work. It took nearly three days before he felt confident enough to try it.
Once more he wrote a series of numbers on a clean slab of wood. Then he erased them. Then he readied the new spell.
“Call remember,” he commanded.
There was a faint “pop” and a tiny figure appeared on the work bench. He was about a foot high with dark slick hair parted in the middle and a silly waxed mustache. He wore white duck trousers, a ruffled shirt and a black bow tie. Without looking at Wiz, he passed his hand over the board and once again the bits of charcoal rearranged themselves into the numbers Wiz had written. Then with another “pop” the figure disappeared.
Wiz goggled. A demon! I just created a demon. Shiara had said that once a spell grew to a certain level of complexity it took the form of a demon but he had never expected to make one himself.
He had never considered what a command would look like from within the computer. I never had to worry about that, he thought, bemused.
This particular command looked darned familiar. Wiz didn’t know for sure, but he doubted that bow ties and waxed mustaches were worn anywhere on this world. After wracking his brains for a couple of minutes he remembered where he had seen the little man before. He was the cartoon character used to represent the interpreter in Starting Forth, Leo Brodie’s basic book on the Forth language.
That made a crazy kind of sense, Wiz told himself. What he had just written functionally was very close to a Forth interpreter. And he was basing his language in part on Forth. Apparently the shape of a demon was influenced by the mental image the magician has of the process.
I wonder if he speaks with a lisp?
Then he sobered. More to the point, how could he be sure that his language’s commands would respond only to the explicit spells that defined them and not by some chance idea or mental image? Wiz made his way back to the castle in deep thought.
###
It wasn’t at all as easy as that. The first thing Wiz discovered was that the universe was not orthogonal. The rules of magic were about as regular as the instruction set on a Z80. Some things worked in some combinations and not in others. Murphy said “constants aren’t” and Murphy was apparently one of the gods of this universe.
He was uncomfortably aware that he didn’t really understand the rules of magic. He deliberately limited his language to the simplest, most robust spells, counting on the power of the compiler to execute many of them in rapid succession to give him his power. But even that turned out to be not so simple.
There were some things which seemed to work and which were very useful, but which didn’t work consistently or wouldn’t work well when called from other spells. Wiz suspected the problem was that they were complex entities composed of several fundamental pieces. He deliberately left them out of the code. After all, he rationalized, this is only version 1.0. I can go back and add them later.
He benchmarked his compiler at about 300 MOPS (Magical Operations Per Second). Not at all fast for someone used to working on a three MIPS (Million Instructions Per Second) workstation, but he wanted reliability, not speed. Besides, my benchmarks are for real, he told himself, not some vapor wafting out of the marketing department.
There were other problems he hadn’t anticipated. Once he tried to write down a simple definition using a combination of mathematical notation and the runes of this world’s alphabet. He gave up when the characters started to glow blue and crawl off the board. After that he was careful never to put a full definition on a single piece of anything. He split his boards into strips and wrote parts of code on each board.
The clean, spare structure of his original began to disappear under a profusion of error checking and warning messages. To keep side effects to a minimum he adopted a packaging approach, hiding as much information as possible in each module and minimizing interfaces.
Wiz spent more and more time at the hut poring over his tablets and testing commands. Sometimes the mice would come out and watch him work at the rude plank bench under the window. Wiz took to eating his lunch in the hut and left crumbs for the mice. Winter was a hard time for the poor little things, he thought.
Moira noticed the change in Wiz, but said nothing at first. Part of her was relieved that he was no longer constantly underfoot, but part of her missed the ego boost that had given her. Deep down there was a part of her which missed seeing Wiz constantly, she finally admitted to herself.
If Shiara noticed, she said nothing. She and Wiz still talked magic, but now it was no longer an everyday occurrence.
What Ugo noticed was anyone’s guess. Probably a great deal, but the goblin kept his counsel and grumbled about his chores as always.
###
Like a small boy with a guilty secret, Wiz went well beyond Heart’s Ease for the first test of his new system. He found a sheltered glade surrounded on all sides by trees and bushes. There he set to work on his first real spell.
There was a jay’s tail feather lying on the leaves, slate blue and barred with black. Wiz picked it up, held it by the quill and slowly and carefully recited his spell.
Nothing happened. The spell had failed! Wiz sighed in disappointment and dropped the feather. But instead of fluttering to the ground, the feather rose. It rotated and twisted, but it ever so gently fell upward from his hand.
Wiz watched transfixed as the feather wafted itself gently into the air.
It wasn’t much of a spell, just enough to produce a gentle current of air which could barely be felt against the outstretched palm. But Wiz was elated by its success. He had actually commanded magic!
###
They marked Mid-Winter’s Day with a feast and celebrations. Ugo cut a large log for the fire. They had mulled wine flavored with spices, nuts, dried fruits and delicacies. With the nuts, fruit and spices Moira whipped up what she called a Winter Bread. It reminded Wiz of a fruitcake.
“In my country it is the custom to give gifts at this time of the year,” Wiz told them. “So I have some things for you.”
Wiz was not very good with his hands, but from a long-ago summer at camp, he had dredged up the memory of how to whittle. He reached into his pouch and produced two packages, neatly tied in clean napkins for want of wrapping paper.
“Lady,” he said, holding the first one out to Shiara. She took it and untied the knot by feel, fumbling slightly as she folded back the cloth. Inside lay a wooden heart carved from dark sapwood, laboriously scraped smooth and polished with beeswax until it glowed softly. A leather thong threaded through a painstakingly bored hole provided a way to wear it.
“Why, thank you Sparrow,” Shiara said, running her fingertips over the surface of the wood.
“This is for you,” he said holding the second package out to Moira. Inside was a wooden chain ending in a wooden ball in a cage.
“Thank you, Sparrow.” Moira examined her present. Then her head snapped up. “This is made from a single piece of wood,” she said accusingly.
Wiz nodded. “Yep.”
She stared at him gimlet-eyed. “Did you use magic to get the ball into the cage?”
“Huh? No! I carved it in there.” Briefly he explained how the trick was done.
Moira softened. “Oh. I’m sorry, Sparrow. It’s just that when I see something like that I naturally think of magic.”
“It’s a good thing I didn’t make you a model ship in a bottle.”
“No,” she said contritely. “I’m sorry for believing you had gone back on your promise not to practice magic.”
“It’s all right,” he mumbled uncomfortably.
In spite of that, the holiday passed very well. For perhaps the first time since he had been summoned, Wiz enjoyed himself. Part of that was the holiday, part of it was that he now had real work to do and part of it—a big part of it—was that Moira seemed to be warming to him.
###
Wiz was chopping wood the next morning when Ugo came out to see him. “More wood!” the goblin commanded, eyeing the pile Wiz had already chopped.
“That’s plenty for one day,” Wiz told him.
“Not one day. Many day,” the goblin said. “Big storm come soon. Need much, much wood.”
Wiz looked up and saw the sky was a clear luminous blue without a cloud in sight. The air was cold, but no colder than it had been.
“Big storm. More wood!” Ugo repeated imperiously and went on his way.
Well, thought Wiz, it’s his world. He turned back to the woodpile to lay in more.
All day the sky stayed fair and the winds calm, but during the night a heavy gray blanket of clouds rolled in. Dawn was rosy and sullen with the sun blushing the mass of dirty gray clouds with pink. By mid-morning the temperature had dropped ominously and the wind had picked up. Ugo, Moira and Wiz all scurried about last-minute tasks.
It started to snow that afternoon. Large white flakes swirled down out of the clouds, driven by an increasing wind. Thanks to the clouds and the weak winter sun, dusk came early. By full dark the wind was howling around Heart’s Ease, whistling down the chimneys and tugging at the shutters and roof slates.
For three days and three nights the wind howled and the snow fell. The inhabitants warmed themselves with the wood Wiz had cut and amused themselves as they might in the pale grayish daylight that penetrated through the clouds and snow. They went to bed early and stayed abed late, for there was little else to do.
Then on the fourth day the storm was gone. They awoke to find the air still and the sky a brilliant Kodachrome blue. Awakened by the bright light through the cracks in the shutters, Wiz jumped out of bed, ran to the window and threw the shutters wide.
Below everything was white. The snow sparkled in the mild winter’s sun. Tree branches bore their load of white. Down in the courtyard of the keep, the outbuildings were shapeless mounds buried under the snowdrifts. The whole world looked clean and bright and new that morning from Wiz’s window.
After a quick breakfast Wiz and Moira went outside.
“It appears no damage was done,” Moira said as she looked over the buildings in the compound. “The roofs all seem to be secure and the snow does not lie too heavily on them.” Her cheeks and the tip of her nose were rosy with the cold, almost hiding her freckles. “We will have to shovel paths, of course.”
“Yeah, and make snowmen,” Wiz said, sucking the cold crisp air deep into his lungs and exhaling in a huge cloud.
Moira turned to him. “What is a snowman?”
“You’ve never made a snowman?” Wiz asked in astonishment. “Hey, I’m a California boy, but even I know how to do that. Here, I’ll show you.”
Under Wiz’s instruction, they rolled the snow into three large balls and stacked them carefully. There was no coal, so stones had to serve as eyes and buttons, while Moira procured a carrot from the kitchen to act as the nose.
“What does he do?” Moira asked when they finished building him.
“Do?” said Wiz blankly.
“Yes.”
“It doesn’t do anything. It’s just fun to make.”
“Oh,” said Moira, somewhat disappointed. “I thought perhaps it came to life or something.”
“That’s not usually part of the game,” Wiz told her remembering Frosty the Snowman. “It’s something done only for enjoyment.”
“I suppose I ought to do more things just for enjoyment,” Moira sighed. “But there was never time, you see.” She looked over at Wiz and smiled shyly. “Thank you for showing me how to make a snowman.”
“My pleasure,” Wiz told her. Suddenly life was very, very good.
He spent most of the rest of the day helping Ugo shovel paths through the drifts to reach the outbuildings. For part of the afternoon he cut firewood to replace the quantities that had been burned during the blizzard. But with that done, they were at loose ends again. The snow was still too deep to do much outside work and most of the inside work was completed. So Wiz suggested a walk in the woods to Moira.
“If it’s not too dangerous, I mean.”
“It should not be. The storm probably affected all lands of beings equally.” She smiled. “So yes, Wiz, I would like to walk in the woods.”
They had to push through waist-high drifts to reach the gate, but once in the Wild Wood the going was easier.
The trees had caught and held much of the snow, so there was only a few inches on the ground in the forest
Although the weak winter’s sun was bright in the sky it was really too cold for walking. But it was too beautiful to go back. The snow from the storm lay fresh and white and fluffy all around them. Here and there icicles glittered like diamonds on the bare branches of the trees. Occasionally they would find a line of tracks like hieroglyphics traced across the whiteness where some bird or animal had made its way through the new snow.
“We had a song about walking in a winter wonderland,” Wiz told Moira as they crunched their way along.
“It is a lovely phrase,” Moira said. “Did they have storms like this in your world?”
“In some places worse,” Wiz grinned. “But it never snowed in the place where I lived. People used to move there to get away from the snow.”
Moira looked around the clean whiteness and cathedral stillness of the Wild Wood. “I’m not sure I’d want to be away from snow forever,” she said.
“I had a friend who moved out from—well, from a place where it snowed a lot and I asked him if he moved because he didn’t like snow. You know what he told me? I like snow just fine, he said, it’s the slush I can’t stand.”
Moira chuckled, a wonderful bell-like sound. “There is that,” she said.
They had come into a clearing where the sun played brighter on the new snow. Wiz moved to a stump in the center and wiped the cap of snow off with the sleeve of his tunic.
“Would my lady care to sit?” he asked, bowing low.
Moira returned the bow with a curtsey and sat on the cleared stump. “You have your moments, Sparrow,” she said, unconsciously echoing the words she had said to Shiara on their arrival at the castle.
“I try, Lady,” Wiz said lightly.
Sitting there with her cheeks rosy from the cold and her hair hanging free she was beautiful, Wiz thought. So achingly beautiful. I haven’t felt this way about her since I first came to Heart’s Ease.
“But not as hard as you used to.” She smiled. “I like you the better for that.”
Wiz shrugged.
“Tell me, where do you go when you disappear all day?”
“I didn’t think you’d noticed,” he said, embarrassed.
“There have been one or two times when I have gone looking for you and you have been nowhere to be found.”
“Well, it’s kind of a secret.”
“Oh? A tryst with a wood nymph perhaps?” she said archly.
“Nothing like that. I’ve been working on a project.” He took a deep breath. It’s now or never, I guess.
“Actually I’ve been working out some theories I have on magic. You see—”
Moira’s mouth fell open. “Magic? You’ve been practicing magic?”
“No, not really. I’ve been developing a spell-writing language, like those computer languages I told you about.”
“But you promised!” Moira said, aghast.
“Yes, but I’ve got it pretty well worked out now. Look,” he said. “I’ll show you.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out the jay’s feather he had used in his experiment. “I’ll use a spell to make this feather rise.”
“I want nothing to do with this!”
“Just hold up a minute will you? I know I can make this work. I’ve been doing it in secret for weeks.”
“Weeks?” Moira screeched. “Fortuna! Haven’t you listened to anything you’ve been told since you got here?”
“I’m telling you it works and I’ve been doing it for a long time,” Wiz said heatedly. “You haven’t seen any ill effects have you? In fact you didn’t even know I was working magic until I told you.”
Moira let out an exasperated sigh. “Listen. It is possible, just possible, that you have been able to do parlor tricks without hurting anything. But that doesn’t make you a magician! The first time you try something bigger there’s going to be trouble.”
“I tell you I can control it.”
“Those words are carved on many an apprentice’s tomb.”
“All right. Here, give me your shawl.”
“No. I’m going to tell Shiara.”
“Moira, please.”
Dubiously, Moira got off the stump and unwound the roughly woven square of cloth she wore around her neck under her cloak. The shawl was bigger than anything Wiz had ever worked with, but he set it down on the stump confidently. Mentally he ran over the rising spell, making a couple of quick changes to adapt it for a heavier object. He muttered the alterations quickly and then thrust his hands upward dramatically.
“Rise!” he commanded.
The edges of the shawl rippled and stirred as a puff of air blew out from under the fabric. Then the cloth billowed and surged taut as the air pressure grew. Then the shawl leaped into the air borne on a stiff breeze rising from the stump. The wind began to gently ruffle Wiz’s hair as the air around the stump pushed in to replace what was forced aloft by the spell.
“See,” he said triumphantly. “I told you I could make it work.”
“Shut it off!” Moira’s green eyes were wide and her freckles stood out vividly against her suddenly pallid skin. “Please shut it off.”
The wind was stronger now, a stiff force against Wiz’s back. Wisps of snow and leaves on the forest floor began to stir and move toward the rising air. Even as Wiz started the spell and the wind rose even higher, Moira’s shawl was long gone in the uprising gale. The wind grabbed leaves and twigs off the ground and hurled them into the sky. The trees around the clearing bowed inward and their branches clattered as they were forced toward the column of air rising out of the clearing.
“Do something!” Moira shouted over the force of the wind.
“I’m trying,” Wiz shouted back. He recited the counterspell, inaudible in the howling wind. Nothing happened. The gale grew stronger and Wiz backed up against a stout tree to keep from being pushed forward. He realized he had made a mistake in the wording and swore under his breath Again he tried the counter spell. Again nothing.
In designing the spell Wiz had made a serious error. The only way to undo it was to reverse the process of creating it. There was no word which could shut the flow of air off quickly.
Meanwhile the wind was picking up, gaining even more force. Now the leaves and twigs were supplemented by small branches torn from the trees around them. With a tremendous CRACK and a thunderous CRASH, a nearby forest giant, rotten in its core, blew over and toppled halfway into the clearing.
The wind was so great Wiz was forced to cling to the tree trunk to keep from being swept up in the raging vortex of air. Moira was invisible through the mass of dirt, leaves, snow and debris being pulled into the air. Desperately Wiz tried the counterspell again. Again nothing.
The vertical hurricane carried denser ground air aloft. As it rose the pressure lessened and the water vapor in the air condensed out. Heart’s Ease was marked by a boiling, towering mushroom cloud that could be seen for miles.
In the heart of a raging hurricane, Wiz forced himself to think calmly. Again he reviewed the spell, going through it step by step as if he were back in front of his terminal. Taking a deep breath and ignoring the howling in his ears, he recited the spell again, slowly and deliberately.
The wind cut off as if by a switch.
The clearing was quiet save for the sound of branches falling back to earth and crashing through the trees around them. Moira was wet and disheveled, her red hair a tangled mess from the buffeting it had received from the wind.
“Of course there are still a few bugs in the system,” Wiz said lamely.
“Ohhh,” Moira hissed. “I don’t want to talk to you.” She spun away from him.
“All right. So it wasn’t perfect. But it worked didn’t it? And I shut it off didn’t I?”
Moira shuddered with barely suppressed rage. But when she turned to face him she was icy calm.
“What you have done is less than any new-entered apprentice could do, were his master so foolish as to allow it,” she said coldly. “Not only have you proved that you have no aptitude for the Craft, you have shown you have no honor as well.”
“Now wait a minute—”
“No!” Moira held up a hand to silence him. “You gave your word that you would not attempt to reduce the things Shiara told you to practice. Now you boast of having violated that oath almost from the beginning and with no shred of excuse. You were not driven to forswear yourself by need. You did so only for your own amusement.”
“Shiara didn’t teach me—”
“Shiara taught you far more than was good for either of you,” Moira snapped. “You have proven yourself unworthy of her teaching and of her trust.” She paused and considered. “Normally a matter such as this would be handled by your master. But you,” she sneered, “have no master.”
The way she looked at him made Wiz feel as if he had crawled out from under some forest rock.
“Doubtless this matter will be placed before the Council and they will decide your fate. In the meantime you must be kept close and watched since it is obvious you cannot be trusted and your word cannot be relied upon.”
She turned and stalked out of the clearing and back toward Heart’s Ease. Wiz opened his mouth to call after her, then trudged up the path in her wake, fuming.