Chapter 4: The Doctor Calls

  ++I was perhaps ten or eleven when my tribe finally reached the end of their tolerance, and I was taken out for my first hunting trip. I never returned from it; body broken by sling-stones and left to die in the wild. When the carrion feeders came, wild dogs circling around me, my desperation brought me power. Until then my self-taught magic had achieved only rudimentary and feeble feats. That was the first time I fed upon the lifeforce of another, restoring myself and healing my wounds.

  That was my first step on the road that would one day lead me to invent necromancy.++

  - From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, ‘The Great Lich’. 1,891 A.E

  Educating a six year-old was actually more mentally painful to me than my eternity spent in sensory deprivation, but then the willpower to do what you do not wish to is the most vital quality any magician can have. I persevered, even as progress came with miserable sluggishness.

  If nothing else, it was refreshing to find that he learned quickly. Relatively speaking, that was. Nothing compared to me, but far more than most of the miserable wretches I had taken on as apprentices in the past.

  It is difficult enough teaching something to a child when you yourself are an adult, doing so as a yet smaller child, one that your intended student considers himself socially superior to, is virtually impossible. Fortunately for me, Agrian the Younger was extremely enthusiastic about magic. So long as I did not take on a tone of ordering and lecturing, which would have him declare me a ‘stupid girl’ and shove me down yet again, I was able to coax him through exercises that I knew would strengthen him, both in control and in raw power. And, more importantly, in versatility. Agrian was soon learning to make more than just heat and force, just as I did.

  I feared he would abandon them before seeing results, but again the boy surprised me by showing an uncharacteristic patience. Perhaps it was merely his enjoyment of the actual acts that kept him focused on them, but he kept at it with significant regularity for all of a week. By then, the fruits of his labours were clear even to him.

  “I magic better!” Agrian still found the mystical arts of talking like an adult to be pathetically beyond him, at least when excited, but I had to admit he did not struggle nearly as much with the arcane. In one week he had grown more than most of the apprentices I had taken in the past—all of them specifically chosen for magical talent—had in months, and he was showing no signs of slowing down. I kept up my secret tutoring as a means of bonding with the boy and earning his favour, before finally moving onto the next stage of my plan.

  Finding an instructor for myself.

  I had already observed that Agrian’s techniques were different than mine, and in some ways, some primitive and unpracticed ways, even superior. Clearly, advancements had been made in the arcane since my absence. I would learn what they were. The easiest way to do this was simply to allow a serving girl to see me performing magic on my own.

  The woman responded predictably, and reported this fact to our father. She was hastily taken to his study, where my mother was also called, and I listened at the door to detect any trace of the resulting conversation.

  I needed to learn this sooner rather than later, if I could, and Agrian the Younger had offered me the perfect chance for just that. It did not take long for him to be summoned to our father’s study, after the maid saw him, and I wasted no time in hurrying over myself to eavesdrop on the resulting conversation.

  With the door locked, and the walls too thick for me to listen through, I would have been cursed to ignorance just a few weeks earlier. Fortunately, I had developed a new power to work around the limitation of my human ears now. An intermediate manifestation of force magic, aether.

  Aether is an interesting substance that does not neatly fit into any single category of matter. It has mass, but it does not. It has depth, and it does not. Its properties are variable and situational, determined by the will and intent of its creator, and not limited by any of the clumsy physical laws that restrict what substances made of molecules can do. You have seen me custom-make aether to distribute electrical energy around me without resistance, and that is just the beginning.

  In theory, there is no reason at all I could not create a plane of aether as thick as a single hair, with the resilience needed to turn aside meteorites or block the very heat of Arwyna’s star.

  In theory, that is. In practice, the magical power needed to create aether increases in proportion to just how logic-defying its properties are. I was a good while away from blocking celestial events with it. Indeed, I was a good while away from starting two bonfires at once with my mind.

  But I could still perform parlour tricks, and a tiny bit of magic, used in the right way, can achieve a great many things. There are advantages to living for thousands of years, even if you do not retain the raw power or magical control it affords you.

  Aether of my level was more like tissue paper than anything else. Were I attacked by enraged insects, it might have made a useful barrier. For anything smaller, it simply did not register. Fortunately I was working now to have it block something smaller by far than any insect.

  Sound.

  Granted, I was still unfamiliar with the specific mechanics of how sound travelled through air, but I knew from personal experimentation that it could be halted by physical material, and directed to travel farther down a tunnel than it would have in open air. I threaded aether into a compact but hollow cylinder, joined to an expanded cone that I placed over the lock of my father’s study before extending the longer section out across the room. This aether was, fortunately, lighter than air, and so it did not need to bear any weight, which was good, since I doubted it had the tensile strength needed to hold up even itself.

  Measuring out the length, I remembered what details I knew of the study to estimate just how far into the room I would need my aether to reach before it came to rest beside my father’s desk. It was fiddly, and strenuous, but I ended up positioning it correctly.

  The end of my aether construct opened up into a half-cone, widened to catch as much sound as possible, something I also did not understand the mechanics of but knew enough to be sure would maximize the clarity of what I heard. Then, with everything in place, I simply waited and listened.

  It was far from perfect, with how fragile and elongated the construct was even something as simple as a harsh gust of wind may have torn it asunder. But we were indoors, the air was still, and sure enough I soon heard what was going on behind the door.

  —”long has your sister been able to do this, Agrian?” It was my mother’s voice, sounding concerned but, I thought, tinged with more emotion than just that. Eagerness? Yes, eagerness. A good sign I thought. That she was speaking to my brother actually surprised me however, had the little idiot come forward and told her about our training once the maid found out I was a magician?

  What Agrian said next, whether it confirmed my suspicions or not, I did not hear. The quality of my audio construct was far from perfect, and even now I had to strain my hearing just to interpret the louder voices formed by adult lungs.

  “Isabel is scarcely more than a baby, son, we know she can’t have taught you.” That was my father, and after it I heard a round of high-pitched squealing. Damn, was my device incapable of picking up the pitch of a child as well? I would have to look into that later, keep it from distorting the sound as much as I could. For the time being, I was limited to missing out on even Agrian the Younger’s loudly screeched exclamations.

  I heard the rough sound of them, however, and could tell that his rage at not being believed went on for quite some time. Naturally, this only confirmed that he was lying in the eyes of our parents. Adults are endlessly unwilling to believe a child about, more or less, anything.

  “Okay, we can ignore that for now,” Agrian the Elder cut in. “It barely matters, your sister can do magic!”

  I leaned closer without meaning to.

  “This is big. Huge, you realise that, yes? We need to get her a tutor, we need to spread the word of this to all corners of Lachfel—no, of Garamon! A one-year-old magician, ha! This will make our damned family!”

  “Agrian!” my mother hissed. “Language!” My father only laughed at his wife.

  “Oh, let the boy listen, he can swear as much as he wants if Isabel’s even half as powerful as I think she is, eh? Think about it Elizabeth, think about what this means! We could have her married to a Demigod. Married, not just serving as some concubine—married!”

  Well there was my answer. I listened ever more intently as my father rambled, finding that, unfortunately, much of what he said appeared to be unfocused, scattered hopes and regurgitated optimism more than any practical assessment of what this implied. Nonetheless, despite his best efforts, I did end up gleaning a few useful pieces of information. Much of it was less than ideal, I did not like his talk of marriages, let alone concubines, one bit, but other pieces piqued my interest for other reasons.

  The first of them, shockingly enough, came from my mother.

  “They’ll take her away though, won’t they?” she asked him. “Edwin won’t have her, he won’t teach a girl. She’ll need to go to one of the Academies. Winzorth, maybe.”

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  “Winzorth!” my father echoed. “Ha! Yes, I should bloody hope our girl ends up there, with talent like this!”

  I noted the name down and compared it to what I’d heard already. As usual, my knowledge was frustratingly incomplete, but this time I found that my previous eavesdropping had already borne fruit. Winzorth was where one of the guests at a previous party my parents held had proudly talked about his son being headed off to.

  There had not seemed to be any sort of grief in that conversation, nor had I detected pity from my parents after the fact. This ‘Winzorth’ place, then, was surely not so bad as that

  I would not actually find out for a while in any case, because even Agrian the Younger was several years too young to enroll in it. My parents’ conversation—now consisting largely of my father growing increasingly more excited as my mother’s worries deepened—eventually reached its natural conclusion.

  A tutor would be called to the house, and ordered to instruct Agrian and myself in the ways of magic. With my talent being ‘discovered’, they would now keep my brother at home to have him schooled alongside me and, I imagined, minimize the risk of him letting the world know of me before they could properly profit.

  Once discussion ended and I heard footsteps begin to approach the door, I made myself scarce. In this case, that consisted of taking a few hurried steps, falling over, and then pretending to have been rolling around on the carpet like some sort of mange-ridden animal. As clumsy as the persona was, it nonetheless dissuaded any suspicion my parents may have felt as they exited the room to see me. Subterfuge is not an especially difficult thing to achieve, when you have the appearance of a one-year-old infant.

  While my mother scooped me up into her arms and began doting more than usual—perhaps out of worry for whatever she thought was awaiting me—I considered the revelations and what to make of them. It was easy enough to chalk my mother’s panic up to simply the worry of being parted from her child, that much I was confident in due to how inconsistent it seemed to be between parents, both my own and others who had been placed in this situation. With that known, it did not seem like I would be witnessing many drawbacks to being known as a prodigious magician.

  Save, of course, for the attention. And that, I still intended to avoid. I was confident that my real consciousness could not be detected in this new body, for the same reason that my phylactery had not been tracked down and destroyed even after millennia, but that did not mean I wished to be thrust into the presence of Ngalaru himself.

  It took only another week before my parents’ decision made itself known, and for that time I had to deal with a few more problems from Agrian the Younger. He was rather insistent that I confess to having tutored him before our parents, still angry about having been called a liar by them.

  Of course I did not oblige him, nor did I particularly bother to explain why. I imagined he would be incapable of understanding if I had and, in any case, the boy was now too fond of his little sister from all the time we’d spent together for him to be even half as barbaric towards me as he had been before. I weathered a few more shoves and a lot of whining, then within a handful of days was free to go about my own business as I had before.

  The first thing I saw to was improving my eavesdropping construct, naturally. It had proven invaluable already, and if I could hammer out its pitch limitations then I would be able to access all the more conversations. That would prove especially useful if I were to follow in Agrian the Younger’s footsteps, and be shipped off to some magical academy. I could only imagine there would be other children there, and thus conversations held at the speaking pitch of children.

  Additionally, this served as a practical exercise to find the limits of my growing powers. I have spoken at length about the intensity of my mana after all my exercises, but have gone over its nature little, aside from describing some of the basic benefits it afforded me such as heat or electricity generation. Allow me to rectify that now.

  Branching out across the spectrum of force, you soon produce heat, then electricity next. There are other forms of energy that can be made, but the limits of nature alone come soon after this, because the only way to maximize what can be done with magic is to gain the ability of forming simultaneous, different natures of mana…then combining them.

  So far I had focused only on producing one variety at a time, simply for training, but with my powers advanced as far as they were I had actually gained the power to muster two at once without even meaning to. This was the secret between my producing aether; combining a primitive ‘matter’ nature with one of force naturally made the stuff, albeit of an extremely low quality.

  This was what caused the easy fraying, and certain other qualities. There was an art to making aether custom-made for particular properties, and in time I would be able to produce materials that could elongate or compress by a factor of thousands, boasted greater hardness than steel, or even that were completely invisible. The possibilities were endless.

  Or rather, the possibilities were limited only by my raw power, once I had perfected the technique of actually making aether with it. Currently the possibilities were just slightly more stable matter than I’d already been making, and I would settle for that.

  It took weeks before anything else of note even hinted at happening in my household, and the monotony was threatening to drive me into madness. I could tolerate an eternity of sensory deprivation, but the incessant mewling I’d been subjected to since entering this world was surely beyond the torture of even Gods.

  At last, Agrian and my new tutor arrived, which did not prove as interesting as I would have hoped but nonetheless gave me something from outside my relatively limited world to examine.

  He was a shorter man than my father, which I understood most men were, and dressed in fabrics that I had gathered were less expensive. The clothing of this new time period was still not entirely known to me, but I’d seen enough to know that this man wore garb that had more in common with our servants than my new family.

  And he was advanced in age. Not old, but more than just aging. In the tribe I had been born to, he would have been waking up each morning with a sigh of relief to find himself not dead in the night. People in this land seemed healthier on average, from what I had seen so far. This one certainly was, and as I studied what really mattered in him—his magic—I found myself pleasantly…

  Not impressed, but at least not offended by his weakness. I would estimate his mana capacity as being a good few dozen times my own, enough to sustain several thousands of vis for at least a minute.

  He would, I decided, do for now.

  ***

  Henry arrived at this over-large mansion and tolerated the frosty reception of its simpleton master, as he always did, and made his way through the building to begin his work shortly after arriving. Tales of arcane prodigies were as common as falling leaves in autumn, and at best one in fifty was correct. Every parent thought their child was special, and if that parent was a landed man whose family had been rich since before the invention of steam power, they would cling to their delusion so much the more.

  So Henry wasn’t moving with any great haste or anticipation. Twenty years of teaching and assessing had taught him better than to expect anything of the world’s idiots, and even less of their idiot children.

  All he really focused on now was how he’d go about spelling this latest disappointment out to the girl’s father. Lord Vorholt was not a stubborn man by reputation, at least by the standards of Garamon’s peerage, but he’d seemed even more anticipatory for his own daughter’s supposed talent to be discovered than most who called on Henry. Perhaps having one actually verified genius in the family, albeit of far lower talent than was being ludicrously claimed here, had left his expectations high.

  He might well get violent, when the truth inevitably disappointed him.

  Isabel Vornholt was starkly different from both her pig-headed father, and her dull-eyed mother. The girl was not even really a child yet, merely a baby with functioning legs, but she stared at Henry as he entered her room, eyes following him like he were being stared at down a sniper’s scope. It was fascinatingly unnerving.

  Unnerving? She’s a damned baby.

  Henry felt a stab of irritation at himself, and hastily stepped into the room, closing the door behind him, before sitting down opposite the girl.

  “Good afternoon Isabel,” he smiled. “I am Doctor Brown, I’m here to assess your…uh, I am here to—”

  —”You want to find out if I can do magic,” the girl cut in. It threw Henry for a loop. He had been catching himself, there, for using too many large words and speaking in a way that might confuse the child. Her comprehension surprised him, and that was saying something given his career.

  “You…speak very well,” he replied. “Considering your age.”

  The girl’s face scrunched up in an expression that seemed entirely at odds with her features. Button nose and round cheeks looking almost comical beside the glare in her eyes.

  “You are wasting my time, stop it. What do you need to see of my magic?”

  Henry decided he would put a pin in this for later, he didn’t recall being warned that this child could talk like a damned adult and he was not entirely comfortable with it. Somehow, it made him more receptive to the idea that her ridiculous talent might be real.

  Fine then, let’s see it.

  “Do you know how to channel mana, Isabel?” He asked. “You might know it as a sort of fluttering feeling in your—oh my God.”

  The girl’s hand was outstretched, and from it came power. Henry could feel the wash of mana like fingers drumming on his skin, and he could see it given physical shape as a flame reached high over the girl’s palm. It was not a great amount, indeed it was childish, but he would have expected to see a display like this from an apprentice of ten or eleven years’ age, one who had been training for several times longer than Isabel had existed.

  Henry stormed from the room without another word, and made his way to Baron Vornholt. The man seemed to be in good spirits, still, as he came in, though his face fell with concern.

  “Doctor,” the man began. “What are—”

  Henry forgot all about propriety, and the dangers of angering aristocracy, and he grabbed the Baron by his lapels. “Is this some sort of sick joke?” He snarled.

  The Baron’s rage came quickly, but Henry didn’t care.

  “Unhand me you damned spellslinger, I’ll have you shot!”

  “The girl,” Henry pressed. “Where did you find her?”

  “What?! Isabel? She’s my damned daughter you madman!” the Baron’s hands closed around Henry’s wrists, and he felt a terrible strength pluck his grip apart like his fingers were not larger or stronger than Isabel herself’s. A moment later he was in the air, flying across the room fast enough that he barely managed a half-formed shield before impacting the wall.

  Stars danced in his eyes as the Baron loomed over him.

  “Take her back,” Henry groaned, barely hearing himself. “She’s…you took her from a temple, or something? A Demigod stolen, and you think it will go unnoticed?” He was hauled back up off the ground, and brought to stare into Baron Vornholt’s eyes.

  “What are you accusing me of, exactly, sir?” the noble growled. His face was like a thing carved into solid iron. Carved while it was cold.

  Henry finally got his wits about him, helped in no small part by the sobering gaze Baron Vornholt was skewering him with.

  “Your daughter, Isabel,” he began. “She is not human, sir, I tell you. The girl boasts power unlike anything I have heard of in a child even twice her age, and I have made a career of studying this world’s foremost prodigies dating back to when Garamon was no more than a lone island.”

  “Then she is a very talented girl,” the Baron replied, calming now, it seemed. “But I do not know any more than that, sir. And I would warn you one last time to stop these accusations.”

  Henry stared at the man, scrutinising his face desperately. He didn’t want to find deception, but he was so fearful of missing it that he made himself look for long seconds before finally speaking again.

  “I see, I…apologize, sir. I do not know what came over me.” By the look on Baron Vornholt’s face, he was far from forgiven. But the Lord seemed to be in a good mood despite everything.

  Henry did not need to even try to guess why.

  “You mistook her for a Demigod?” he mumbled, more to himself than to Henry.

  “Yes, Baron.”

  The man smiled. “Then she is a fine catch indeed.”