Chapter Fourteen
1 May 1767
Prince Haven
Temperance Bay, Mystria
Prince Vlad sat back, removed his glasses, and scrubbed hands over his face. How can my eyes burn when my blood is running cold?
Documents and books lay strewn over his desk as if it were debris washed down the Benjamin River after the earthquake. The damage in Temperance Bay and Bounty was not severe, though requests for supplies had been sent down river and goods started back up in the hands of the militia. Prince Vlad had given Caleb Frost the responsibility for organizing a company of men to make the trip. Caleb, he trusted, would make sure the supplies reached those who needed them and would resist the temptation of profiteering along the way.
Princess Gisella and Owen’s wife had spearheaded relief efforts in Temperance Bay. They solicited donations, sorted them, and arranged for them to be shipped south to Kingstown. Though Catherine Strake hated being in Mystria, she did enjoy exercising unfettered power. This made her very useful in dealing with the current crisis.
Their efforts bought Prince Vlad time to work on two projects. One was Mugwump’s flight training. The Prince was proud of his effort; the dragon was flying short distances without tiring quickly and appearing to gain strength and confidence each day. He, as yet, did not have the agility to pluck a bird out of the air, but he enjoyed flying enough to chase after wood doves. Vlad had cousins who were devoted to the art of falconry, and the Prince entertained fantasies of bringing Mugwump to one of their hunting jaunts.
The only thing the Prince did not like about the flight training was that he had no parameters for knowing how much dragons flew or pretty much anything else about the demands this would be making on Mugwump. The thing that troubled him the most was that Mugwump appeared to tolerate directions, but really didn’t enjoy them. The dragon had never given him a glance that suggested he was thinking of just devouring the Prince—more of a look that said, “I know what I’m doing,” which reflected a bit more annoyance than amusement.
Prince Vlad generally ended training sessions shortly after such looks. Mugwump was content to eat his fill and sleep for a long time after his flights. Not only did this give the Prince a chance to recover from his own aches and pains, but to work on his second problem—the problem that had sent a chill through him.
Bishop Bumble had sadly reported that none of the missives from Ephraim Fox survived. Within twelve hours of that message being delivered, however, a burlap satchel full letters and manuscripts appeared on the Frosts’ doorstep. Dr. Frost had brought them to the Prince, and Vlad had retreated to his laboratory to study them.
They were remarkable in two ways. First, Ephraim Fox, or Ezekiel Fire as he had begun to call himself when he created the True Oriental Church of the Lord, had done an incredible job of cataloguing plants and animals in Mystria. The details he provided on each rivaled those recorded by the most careful of Tharyngian naturalists. His early work referenced some of their work and referenced journals that he appeared to have made of his observations of natural phenomena while studying in Norisle. Had the Prince known of the man and his passion for precision, he’d have hired him to travel with Nathaniel on expeditions.
Unfortunately, as brilliant as the observations were, the conclusions drawn from them were utterly and completely insane. Right next to a traced outline of a leaf, onto which had been drawn the veins and to which had been added a host of critical details, would be a long list of Scriptural references. Some clearly related to the ratios of leaf length to width, or the number of ribs and veins, or the number of points or petals on a flower. Others were abstracted through more arcane formulae, most of which the Prince could not intuit. The Norisle journals appeared to be the key to deciphering some of the material.
Prince Vlad tucked himself into Ezekiel Fire’s world so deeply he began to see things through the man’s eyes. He pulled out his own journals to double-check the man’s observations. He crawled around outside, looking for new samples which he could measure and test against Fire’s work. Before very long, Vlad began to see patterns in nature—very much the same patterns Fire did.
And, unfortunately, he saw more.
It all boiled down to the question of whether or not magick had predated the ability of men to read and write. Clearly it had. Illiterate men like Nathaniel Woods could be taught to use magick, so reading and writing were not necessary, but an ability to reason was. Prince Vlad’s initial instructions in magick had involved reading the formula for a spell, memorizing it, transforming it into a symbol or concept, and then invoking that concept. His instructor had mentioned, for example, that some men think of a torch when igniting brimstone, and others the sun. That symbolic representation allowed them to focus magickal energy for the desired result.
As a teaching method, that made sense, but it didn’t point out how preliterate people learned that they could access magick or how they trained themselves to focus it. One of the basic laws of magick, the Law of Sympathy, suggested that like objects could have a similar effect on a target. In preparing medicines for the heart, the foxglove, because of its heart-shaped blossom, was considered extremely valuable. Such linkages would have been obvious to the preliterate. In fact, as Fire had appeared to discover, many of the measurements in nature encouraged abstraction, which generated a symbol, upon which focus could be devoted to attain a desired magickal result. The idea, then, that early magicians had learned how to do magick based on things they saw in nature, made perfect sense.
Where Fire pushed it further was that he linked these measurements to scattered Scriptural verses. When Prince Vlad began playing with them, pulling them together and ordering the sentences, he immediately noticed two things. First, the words had the same sort of rhythm and cadence as offered in spell formulations. Second, and this had taken closer reading, the verses differed from the original Achean and Phaonaean verses. They were not so different as to be wholly incorrect, but the use of unsuitable or inexact synonyms for the original words made the translation more difficult than it needed to be.
Which made no sense. Prince Vlad sighed. It made no sense unless an entrenched group of magickers within the Church of Norisle had conspired with King Robert in creating his version of the Good Book. It seemed so monstrous and yet elegant a plan that Vlad did not know whether to be horrified or pleased with the work done by his ancestor. It appeared that the Church might have turned the Good Book into a grimoire. This put the key to magickal power into the hands of everyone, since the book had been printed and widely distributed. As primitive as Mystria was, Vlad doubted there was a village where at least one copy of the Good Book couldn’t be found, and many were the families who cherished their own heirloom copies.
He rubbed his eyes. How often had he seen the sign in the cathedral, where Bishop Bumble had posted a list of Scriptures to be read and contemplated during the week? His sermons were liberally sprinkled with Scriptural references—some of which made no sense to Vlad, and now he understood why. The printed version of those same sermons often included footnotes that referenced yet other passages.
Anyone who knew the key to deciphering the verses could learn new magicks. The Church had, in essence, adopted the same sort of book-based code that the Prince shared with his father and with Owen, but in this case the key was also the message. And since books and verses were independent of page counts, any Good Book, big or small, in multiple volumes, would serve, provided it faithfully reproduced the King Robert Version text.
It seemed clear from Fire’s writing that he felt his discovery of these spells within Scripture were confirmation of God’s hand in their original transcription and in the KRV translation. Prince Vlad had no difficulty seeing the Church having a different reaction—primarily one of panic to learn that a madman had somehow cracked their code. This meant that anyone who learned it could use their grimoire, even Tharyngians. And some Church officials must have seen the even greater ramifications of Fire’s work. He’d discovered the key by looking at nature, which meant anyone could rediscover the key.
Vlad shivered. The implications of all that were beyond his ability to fully comprehend. He wondered, however, if basic magick principles worked in ways he’d not considered before. The Law of Sympathy, for example, or the Law of Contagion. Could the Church use a person of a certain bloodline to control others in that bloodline? The Church encouraged—and often selected—members of noble families to enter its ranks. Vlad had seen that as a measure the nobility had taken to guarantee that the Church would not betray political leaders, but what if it was reversed? What if his father, for example, was a means through which King Richard could be controlled? And not just because he might be a hostage, but through some sorcerous influence that Prince John might not even understand. What if my father’s prayers for his brother constituted a formula through which the King was magically controlled?
Though that thought disturbed Vlad the most—primarily for its implication for his children—he set it aside for the consideration of a greater issue. He went back to Fire’s texts. Fire had used his observations of the natural world as confirmation of patterns in Scripture. Prince Vlad reversed that. He found a formulation that most closely approximated the words used to teach him to shoot a musket. He copied out the lines and included the numbers. The jumble of verses read, “The sun stood still and lit the way, shadows growing small.”
He compared the words and data to plants, animals, and anything else he could think to use. Correlation escaped him at first, then he closed his eyes and composed a mental picture of what the words suggested. The sun was standing still, so he visualized it at its zenith. That would naturally make shadows small, but not completely invisible. Depending upon how far north one was from the equator, the angle of the shadow to the base of a rod would vary. It struck Vlad that while the image mirrored the noonday sun, it did so without invoking the sun directly. He suspected it did so because the image created would trigger magick sufficient for lighting brimstone and because, somewhere lost in the annals of time, a sorcerer invoking the power unleashed by the sun’s direct image had accessed incredible power or caused a disaster, or perhaps both.
So the image we are trained to focus upon limits us. Prince Vlad frowned. The reason a musket spat fire when shot was because not all of the brimstone used in the charge was consumed before the ball left the muzzle. More powerful magicks might consume the brimstone completely, creating more pressure. That might burst a gun barrel, but were the breech strong enough, the greater propulsion would make a bullet go further and faster.
The reverse engineering of the spell cracked the door on an area of study that was at the root of all magick. The Tharyngians, when they overthrew the King and Church during their revolution, had begun to use scientific methods of measurement and observation to study and quantify the basic principles of magick. Had they had Fire’s notes, they might well have understood everything and be so far beyond any other nation in the ability to control magick that they would be unstoppable. There was no doubt that the infinite power granted through magick could so thoroughly corrupt one that he might attempt to take over the world—and make him believe he might be successful in that attempt.
The Tharyngians’ study had uncovered several things. Guy du Malphias had been able to reanimate the dead. Owen’s reportage about what Prince Vlad took to be a control center suggested the Laureate could control his pasmortes at range. Owen had also seen du Malphias move objects with magick. This meant that either the dictum that magick only worked by touch was wrong or that du Malphias had managed to redefine touch. The idea that magicians were taught that magick only worked at touch certainly limited their ability to use it, but exactly how one could redefine touch escaped the Prince.
And then he heard Mugwump give his usual trumpeted bellow to welcome the wurmwright and dinner. In his laboratory, the sound came muted because it had to travel through the wall. Outside it would be crisp and clear and in the wurmrest it would be deafening. Then he remembered the times he’d ridden Mugwump while the dragon dove for fish in the river, and how the bellow had sounded different in water. Then it struck him.
Magick did only work by touch. The key was in defining the medium through which it moved. Just as water and the wall changed the nature of the sound so, too, might magick be changed by communication through another medium. Depending upon range and air pressure one might have to adjust a spell, just as one would have to speak louder to be heard over a storm. The cost paid for invoking such a spell might well be greater, too, so that limiting spells used at range would be a way to guarantee that magicians did not exhaust or kill themselves.
And using little devices, as du Malphias did for controlling his pasmortes, that used the laws of magick might make invoking those spells easier. If like spoke to like through channels that didn’t involve air or, somehow, the intervening space, then magick might become even easier at range. Two halves of the same stone, no matter how far apart, might react within magick as if they were still part of a whole.
Vlad closed his eyes. Tangents and angles, symbols and their duplications, and the implications of all that spread through his mind. He could see the spells he knew lining up in a new order. If the spell to shoot a gun was near the top of the sun spells, then the spell to light a candle would be much lower. And, not surprisingly, he’d always visualized that spell as the sun dawning. The spell to extinguish such a flame he saw as the sun setting.
He saw what Ezekiel Fire had seen, though he doubted Fire had completely understood what he discovered. Prince Vlad could peel the limitations that clothed magick and take it back to its most raw and powerful form. He could provide greater access more simply for more people, which would make their lives infinitely easier.
And give everyone the chance to be corrupted by that power. In a heartbeat he understood why the Church had done what it did. In the next he feared what their knowledge would allow them to do. They had distributed grimoires so their selected agents would have access to advanced magicks as needed. Until Vlad knew who those people were, and why they were being given knowledge forbidden to the average man, he couldn’t judge whether their effort should be encouraged or destroyed.
And he wondered, as he opened a blank notebook and began to outline his own system of magick, if he would fall victim to infinite power or if his purpose—balancing the Church’s tyranny—might somehow save him from magick’s corrupting influence.