Doctor D’Arco, Sorcerer of London

14. Magia Intrinseca

Chapter 14

Magia Intrinseca

“Buckingham.” Walker tapped me lightly on the arm. As I turned to him he inclined his head to the left, and I apologized for my distraction.

“Buckingham,” Ashcroft repeated as I leaned forward to look to the left down the table, “did the professor mention when he would be here?”

“Not to me,” I replied simply.

I did not know whether it was my imagination, or whether the sensation below my skin meant that I had begun involuntarily to summon him again, or whether he had never left me entirely alone—but even through the surrounding and ever-present sense of him underground, I felt Victor’s approach before the others gave any sign, the familiar terror of his shadow slipping quietly into the back of my mind.

I let my eyes close, saying nothing.

Then I thrust the thought I dared not name down to the depths of my soul.

“Said he had some preparations,” I heard a new voice add from my right: Lloyd, who seemed so far to say so little.

“Suppose I should start arriving later,” Ashcroft returned, “if that’s when he?—”

Ashcroft never finished. The iron-clad doors slammed shut with a thundering boom ; the light of the chandeliers swayed, or my equilibrium slipped, and I was startled out of a half-swoon by the eruption of heat and light in the fiery Hellmouth behind Victor’s empty throne.

Walker looked at me with a kind of calculating admiration.

Reinhardt shook Forsythe by the shoulder, rousing him from where he had slumped forward onto the table.

The light of the hall dimmed as a darkness crept toward us from behind, engulfing and extinguishing the candles in the chandeliers. I do not think any of us turned. We knew the uncanny sense of him well.

As the long, heavy stride grew closer, there was no light left but the infernal hearth, silhouetting Victor’s looming black form as he settled into his throne—and the single candle he set down onto the carven table before him, burning on top of what looked like a wax-encrusted human skull. His dark gaze surveyed his students slowly, one by one—Ashcroft, then Forsythe, then Reinhardt beside me—and my faint tremor of anticipation hitched quietly in my throat as Victor’s eyes locked on mine, holding me until I could not imagine the escape of looking away, releasing me gently as he turned to Walker at my right side.

I let myself breathe, watching the candle burn on the skull, not daring to think of anything more than my effort to quell the nervous quickening of my pulse.

“This is not precisely a memento mori ,” his voice rumbled, a deep vibration in the warm air that I thought I felt penetrate to the bone, “given that death for the sorcerer can be relatively less than inevitable. Yet after the events of our previous class I remind you, before we begin today, of the imperative of celibacy during these times of increased disprite activity. Be assured I am sympathetic to the Faustian mood,” the candlelight from atop the skull on the table flickered in his dark eyes as they drifted left, perhaps to Forsythe, “and the deep desire to experience the pleasures of the world which so often inspires the pursuit of sorcery. But turn your desire—for now—to your art alone. All of you. This is not a matter of delicate propriety, but strictly of practical survival: desire without single-minded focus will draw more of Balnock’s kind; that is why they have the reputation for temptation. However,” he relaxed, leaning slowly back into his throne, “if you find that you cannot, and would rather make yourself a particularly attractive prey for adventurous disprites, you are welcome to inform me as to your preferences for the type of candle you would like to have burning atop your thick head. The next skull on my shelf may be your own.”

He paused, and the blazing hearth crackled in the following silence.

“This gentleman likely met a different fate,” Victor continued, gesturing to the skull on the table, “though its specifics remain contested. Reputedly, this is Roger Bacon: Franciscan friar, medieval scientist and sorcerer, creator of the infamous necromantic brazen head; his skull was previously in the collection of William Blake. For our purposes he is now a relic, if you will.”

My eyes remained on the skull. A thin rivulet of new wax crept over the old candle trails to drip into the shadows of an eye socket.

“Now,” Victor intoned, “if our old friend’s candle were to go dark”—he reached out a scarred, muscular hand, casually extinguishing the flame between his forefinger and thumb—“how might a sorcerer light it again? Little more than a parlor trick in itself, yet the same forces that kindle a lone flame might set the world on fire. You will give me specific answers—one each, in order, until all possibilities are exhausted. It need not be your own preferred technique, only one not yet addressed. Ashcroft, begin.”

“Summon a disprite,” Ashcroft replied with a certain nonchalance, “preferably a fire elemental, and call for it to light the candle.”

“Correct, Ashcroft. A textbook description of magia evocatoria . If you find the question tedious, however, you may wish next time to provide a less obvious answer. Forsythe.”

“ Magia intrinseca , professor. Imagine the candle lighted and force one’s own will out into the world.”

“Good, Forsythe. Reinhardt?”

“Channel the element of fire itself through one’s body, toward the candle.”

“Good; halfway between the previous two, depending upon specificity of technique. Buckingham?”

The three answers I had readied were now taken, and while I could invent subtle variations upon them, those would scarcely be original enough to satisfy my taste, let alone my assignment: Compete with them, Elizabeth , he had said to me days ago. Outdo them. Show me that you are stronger. Was this what he had named sprezzatura to Forsythe in their duel? Effortless virtuosity? I needed it, now more than ever: not merely to impress by my answer, but in doing so to conceal from all of them the secret horror of a sea-change in the unsounded soul.

From them—and from myself.

“If there is a power in the skull itself,” I began—this was a risk, as I had found thus far no mention of such a thing in the volumes he lent me, but that in itself suggested some measure of originality in the idea—“I imagine there must be a way to focus or manipulate it into a flame.”

“In which of the codexes and scrolls assigned to you, Buckingham, have you read of such a practice?”

“None of them, professor.”

Somewhere to my left, I thought I heard Ashcroft sigh.

“And yet you found this unaccountable impression worthy of being named?”

“Yes, professor.”

Because I cannot name the other unaccountable impression that haunts me so , I thought to myself, but could not say it—dared not think it in his presence. Words are magic. He said so himself; I read it in his books. To name is to summon power. To give life.

To make true.

With all the light now from the hearth at his broad back, I could no longer see Victor’s eyes—but I thought, somewhere amid the sound of the fire behind his black silhouette, that I heard a low, rolling chuckle in the warm air.

“Good! Poor theory, Buckingham, but the only brave answer thus far; theory can be learned, making audacity of greater value. Walker, rather than a standard reply, you will address Buckingham’s response.”

“There is some power in the skull of a deceased sorcerer,” Walker nodded as he began, “though like most magical artifacts, it is specific in its uses—not something one can simply transmute into fire. Most artifacts are weak by themselves, without a sorcerer to wield them. The exceptions—something like the Lapis Philosophorum, for example, or various other legendary pieces—are so rare as to be beneath consideration, and even if they exist, are mostly wanted for curse-breaking.”

Out of the corner of my right eye, I caught Greycliff shifting uncomfortably in his seat.

I kept my breath and my countenance even, allowing no outward sign that my thoughts flew instantly to the Talisman of Thoth. Though neither mentioned it by name, between Walker’s words and my memory of Iris’s, the warp and weft of its tale began to intertwine: the Talisman was nothing, or it was everything, and on the slim hope of the latter no price was too dear to wager. Hargrave readily exchanged room, board, and a stipend for it. Greycliff risked his place in the Order on the chance that something like the Talisman existed, and if it did, that the legends of its capacity for curse-breaking were true.

I wondered whether Greycliff was already a student of Victor’s at the time of his supposed adventure in larceny, and if he was, why he could not have simply sought Victor’s aid. Did Victor—as seemed to be his style—want for Greycliff to solve the Brighton curse largely on his own, preferring not to provide him spoon-fed answers?

Or was there a curse that even Doctor D’Arco could not yet break?

“In any case,” Walker continued, “something like this skull is used as a kind of sorcerer’s tool, and for some purpose related to its form or significance. An enhancement for spells relating to death, a map for more precise visualization and healing of head injuries, a means by which to facilitate the summoning of its original owner?—”

“Professor,” I heard Forsythe interrupt to my left, “if I may?—”

Victor turned toward him. “You may, Forsythe.”

Reinhardt leaned back in his chair, likely to give Walker a better view of a response he hoped would prove unflattering.

Forsythe put a black-gloved fist to his mouth and cleared his throat. “What about that, professor? Since Bacon was a sorcerer in life, couldn’t one summon him , specifically, to affect the candle now on his own skull?”

“Less reliable as a method, but a worthy experiment nonetheless. Well done, Walker— and , again, Forsythe. Lloyd?”

“As the story goes, he had a rival sorcerer in Friar Bungay. If Bacon won’t be summoned, perhaps Bungay will be.”

“Unusual, Lloyd, but intriguing. Good. Greycliff?”

“Mundane, professor, but,” Greycliff paused, “I’d strike a match. Someone must’ve called that sorcery once.”

Ashcroft started to speak, then Reinhardt, then the rest; Victor calmly overrode them all: “Buckingham,” he intoned, silencing all others, “you will contest or defend Greycliff's theory of sorcery.”

“Defend, professor.” I felt the motion of men shifting positions along the table, the attention of several sets of eyes.

The great black silhouette before me nodded slowly. “Proceed.”

“It’s terribly mundane to us, perhaps—hardly what we would call magic. But there was a time that nobody believed in matches, either.”

“Do you presume to imply, Buckingham, that the definition of sorcery is a matter of semantics, scientific progress, or societal convention?”

“All three, professor.”

“Then you are correct.”

I thought I saw Greycliff attempt to catch my eye, and turned to him only long enough to exchange a brief nod.

“ Sorcery , in the broadest sense of the word,” Victor began, “can include all that is taught and practiced by the Order: any hidden or half-hidden science, art, or process of knowledge which has, at some point, offended society’s sensibilities—produced a hairline crack in popular convention’s brittle, self-appointed jurisdiction over what is adjudged not only to be moral but even to be true . I remind you of Giordano Bruno of the Kingdom of Naples, burned at the stake for sorcery, remembered now as a hero of science.

“This should be novel to none of you. Nor is it news that you are in this class to study the practices suggested by a more precise use of the word sorcery : most famously, this is magia evocatoria , the summoning of disprites in its assorted variations. Banishment of disprites is taught simultaneously, a complimentary and often useful inverse. Yet to limit one’s art to summoning and banishment alone, for the mere sake of the name of sorcery, is in itself to advance convention for its own sake. And that is antithetical to the emancipated mind of the sorcerer.

“I have received now seven proposals for means to relight the candle on Friar Bacon’s head. Three involved contacting an individual spirit who would in turn light the candle: sorcery as it is most renowned. One involved invoking the natural force of fire. Two more relied upon power presumed to be resident in an object: in the skull itself,” though I could not be certain in the darkness that cloaked him, I thought he turned to me, then to Greycliff, “or a match.

“Now,” he leaned forward over the table in anticipation, a great black shadow wreathed in the thin trail of smoke from the extinguished candle, “for any who will answer: what is the commonality among these six techniques I have thus far summarized?”

“They all could work, in theory, though some are more likely than others.”

“Generally correct, Greycliff, albeit not what I had in mind. Anyone else?”

Six techniques , he said, but this was out of seven responses: the odd man out, not mentioned in Victor’s summary, was Forsythe and his initial suggestion of magia intrinseca . Too clearly this had come now to the moment of my question to Victor before class, and his disclosure to me that he would in this session distinguish magia esterna from magia intrinseca ; the phrases in themselves were similar enough to their equivalents in English, let alone in French, as to leave in this context little doubt. “They’re six forms of magia esterna , professor.”

“Correct, Buckingham. Why esterna ?”

I had never been told, but I was confident in what seemed to me the clear deduction to be made: “Because they draw upon something outside the self—external magic. The source of the magic is external to the sorcerer.”

“Precisely,” Victor replied, seemingly pleased, and I thought that I heard his voice in my mind as clearly as in my ears. “Ashcroft,” he continued, and I felt his attention shift from me, “to elucidate the point further: when you summon a disprite, and the candle lights, what is the source of the magic that lights the candle?”

“The disprite, professor,” Ashcroft answered slowly, suspicion in his voice, as if so self-evident a solution must suggest either a mockery or a trap. “Clearly.”

“Clearly,” Victor echoed. “And should the same disprite decide one day to light a candle for his own purposes, how would he do so?”

Ashcroft drew a breath to speak, stopped himself, and began again. “He is a disprite,” he ventured, warily, “and so—presumably—if he can light a candle for me, he can light a candle for himself whenever he should please.”

“Deeper, Ashcroft. Again.”

A pause. “He is a disprite, and therefore magical by nature.”

“And so if, say, in some decade or century to come—whenever our new acquaintance Balnock manages to pull together another corporeal form, after I reduced most of his previous one to a waste of ash and fog—if, in the future, a sorcerer takes it upon himself to summon that particular disprite to light a candle,” Victor allowed a brief silence, “Balnock would, theoretically, light the candle himself?”

“Of course, professor.”

“Balnock would not need to summon in turn some other disprite to accomplish this for him? And that disprite must summon another, and on and on, until we have a fine train of impotent disprites encircling a dark candle?”

“No, professor,” Ashcroft allowed himself to chuckle at the absurdity. “He’s a disprite. His art comes from within him?—”

“There,” Victor breathed, seizing upon the end of Ashcroft’s words with a mixture of triumph and relief. “There it is, Ashcroft. His art comes from within him . The disprite’s source of magic is himself.”

“ Magia intrinseca .” Forsythe dared to clip the end of Victor’s sentence in his eagerness. “Intrinsic magic. The innate interior power.”

Even as Forsythe spoke, I heard Victor murmur in the shadows of the fire—words I could not understand; a vibration I could feel in the heat of the air once, twice—my muscles tensed, my body bracing in new instinct for the shock of his spell?—

With the third iteration of his words the candle flared to life atop Friar Bacon’s waxy skull, the flame flashing ghost-blue before burning a bold orange, and as my gaze rose to watch the light flicker in Victor’s fiery eyes and steel mask, I felt the force of his art ripple slowly through my flesh. I nearly gasped for the strangeness of it; the bone-deep impact for which I had waited never came, diffused instead into a long, subtle shudder of heat, at once more tolerable and less. It left my head light, the tips of my nerves cold and alive when the heat finally passed, and the last of the tingling sensation of his art shivered across my skin.

Had he held himself back for me? Had I half-thwarted him somehow, and in doing so altered the feeling of his surging sorcery? I was after all in his direct line of sight, in close proximity, being precisely across the table from him with the candle halfway between us.

All I knew for certain was that, through it all, his eyes never left mine—and that, in the place in the back of my mind which seemed now the most susceptible to his shadow, I wondered if I became aware of a kind of satisfied pride.

Perhaps his. Perhaps my own.

“The great Promethean fire,” Victor’s deep voice rolled through the Hellmouth heat, thick and urgent and sonorous, “was never stolen from the other world: it was ours all along. It lies waiting in the body—where fire, water, air, and earth meet—and is ignited by the mind. Imagination and will, their force driven by the indomitable desire of the self in itself. That is magia intrinseca .”

“In one of my previous classes,” Ashcroft ventured carefully after a pause, “they liked to call that demonic magic.”

Victor grunted in reply, somewhere between amusement and irritation. “Whether by happenstance or design, the arts taught by the Order are entirely external: their engine is the herbs of the earth, or the wandering stars, or a formula, a deity, a place. This is not to say that these cannot also be true; in my time I have experimented with nearly all of them, and some of such practices I have adopted and adapted to suit my own talents and interests. But they are not the only truth. Demonic is not a particularly clever way to describe the intrinsic art—every practice taught by the Order has been called demonic by its detractors—though in this case it is perhaps not as fantastically inane as it sounds. Magia esterna can conjure disprites: demons , or faeries , or whatever has become the fashionable term. Magia intrinseca is the mortal equivalent of their own innate art.”

“Thus rendering summoning,” Forsythe responded, “as well as all the rest… obsolete, in theory? Why call in a faerie to do something when you can do the same yourself?”

“In theory,” Victor nodded slowly in acknowledgement, “and sometimes in practice, depending upon one’s particular abilities and inclinations. Yet, though magia intrinseca is likely the older art, magia esterna proliferates where intrinseca does not, because a good portion of the external arts can, to a certain degree, be taught. The intrinsic arts must be felt. I can teach you where and under what conditions to plant an orange tree, and how to encourage its growth. I can tell you how its fruit swells and ripens on the branch; teach you when to peel it and eat. But I cannot teach you how to taste it.”

“Professor,” I ventured, watching his regard snap back to me. “I reveal my inexperience by asking, surely, though I cannot help but wonder: do the disprites themselves have a preference? Are they pleased to see us perform magic as do they, or does the possibility of an autonomous mortal sorcerer vex them?”

Beneath the darkness of his hood, I thought that his eyes flashed in the light of the lone candle; I do not know why my attention lowered to his hand where it lay on the table beside Friar Bacon’s skull, but I wondered if I saw it tense—a subtle flexion in the iron tendons of that hand that once held mine—or whether it was no more than a shifting of shadows.

“An astute question, Buckingham,” he replied, no change in his voice, “and one to which there is no single answer. It is vital to remember that disprites are individuals—some of them vehemently so—and therefore that they share no consensus. Yet some positions are nonetheless more widespread than others. Some disprites are possessed by their own concerns, which may seem as inconsequential or incomprehensible to us as ours do to them, and have no interest in our affairs. Some disprites are inquisitive and, I suspect, study the mortal intrinsic arts as a curiosity. Some will assist or even seek you if you are fair in your dealings with them, whether out of a personal fellow-feeling or because you have or can provide something they want. And some will deem you an overreacher and usurper, grasping at power that was never meant to belong to mortal man, worthy of destruction for your singlehanded upset of a forbidden apple-cart. Which is all to say,” he chuckled darkly, “that they are quite human, all in all.

“But enough theory, for now. The practical portion of class, unsurprisingly, will be the extinguishing of Bacon’s candle. While I encourage and prefer an attempt be made at magia intrinseca , I will accept any form of sorcery; as always, any disprite to be summoned must be named to me in advance, and I remind you that a fully corporeal apparition is (by design) difficult and unlikely in this room. Reverse order, starting with Greycliff. The rest of you will prepare, if you wish, or do as you will.”

Victor turned to watch Greycliff, and I persuaded myself to watch the other students as they began to speak to one another in hushed tones, listening to them more closely than often I did, forcing myself into the distraction of their world: the posturing, the alliances and strifes, the exchanges of subtle slights. Walker turned to Lloyd, asking him something about the skull, casting some or other aspersions upon commercialized magic; Reinhardt ran his fingers along his stage wand, head bowed in concentration, though I thought that his closed eyes flicked open now and again to his right, and I could not imagine him not listening; Ashcroft expressed some interest in Forsythe’s rapier, which served to give Forsythe license to recount his morning of martial bravery.

And then, my self-proposed interest in the other students fading, my aversion to Forsythe’s earlier advances causing his voice to irritate my ears anew, by the time I reevaluated my senses I realized I was watching Victor again.

Let be, I thought to myself—surely it was nothing unnatural. As his apprentice, it followed that I should attend closely to his words, even when they were not ostensibly for me.

He bound himself to me in blood, I reminded myself, and for hours at the oak tree he had merged his perception with my own, enwrapping me in some far verge of his shadow—it was not strange, therefore, that I should feel connected to him so.

All this, I told myself, was natural. Intentional. Expected.

“I’ll use magia intrinseca ,” Greycliff’s voice came from somewhere to my right, “professor.”

“Good,” Victor’s voice rumbled. “Begin.”

I watched him watch Greycliff, the candlelight that flickered across the profile of Victor’s mask making its vertical slits resemble all the more the grim mouth of Friar Bacon’s skull. Victor leaned forward over the table, a hulking mass of darkness, his powerful hand on the carven wood surface curling idly into a loose fist; Greycliff’s deep breathing began to pick up pace, his furrowed brow twitching over his tightly closed eyes, and by the firelight I thought that his skin grew damp with sweat.

A log in the fire cracked with a burst of sparks and Greycliff’s eyes opened with a start, his concentration shattered. His breath came hard and fast as he wiped his brow on his sleeve with frustrated force, lip curled in a sneer to meet the pull of his scar. “Did the flame move, at least?”

“Not yet.” There was a vague amusement in Victor’s voice, though neither disappointment nor any particular reassurance.

Greycliff cursed under his breath.

“It is a rare man who can force himself to feel,” Victor continued, “though the will in its highest degree of power makes all things possible. Nonetheless, I suspect you will have an easier time of it with a clearer target. Imagination defines the mark for the will to strike. Work on your visualization , as it is called—a poor word, suggesting the use of only the memory of the eyes. Create the darkened candle with every sense you can.”

“Thank you, professor.”

“Lloyd. Begin.”

“I mean to use magia intrinseca , professor. Imagine we’ve had enough Tylwyth Teg for one week.”

“I would not deny you the summoning of one of your connections among them, if you wish, though for the sake of your expanding repertoire I am glad to see you choose the intrinsic art. Good. Proceed.”

Lloyd retained his composure better than did Greycliff, or perhaps it was merely that the black shock of his beard hid most of his face. He leaned slightly forward toward the candle on the skull, his eyes open yet half-unseeing, managing to mirror some measure of Victor’s expectant pride: Lloyd began seemingly with a self-assurance that Greycliff lacked, and I thought that I sensed from Victor an interest, an anticipation. Neither endured. As time passed, and the candle burnt steadily on, Lloyd began to grow restless, and I watched Victor’s attention to him dim.

“Enough, Lloyd.” Victor released him rather mercifully from his failing art, and Lloyd settled back into his chair, acknowledging defeat with a faint bow of the head. “A strong attempt. I suspect you do not need me to tell you that the moment your confidence faltered is the moment the game was lost. If you cannot yet recover it easily, I advise not to continue in its decline. Break from your art, convince yourself that the conditions were not opportune, and begin anew another time.”

Lloyd nodded, and as Victor called next upon Walker beside me, it occurred to me how little time I had left to prepare for my turn.

“ Magia evocatoria , professor,” Walker pronounced quietly. “I wish to summon Malavros, Baron of the Black Lake, a disprite who has aided me in the past.”

“Very well,” Victor grunted. “Begin.”

Walker bowed his head, drawing his black hood back up to shadow the severe features of his face, and I could not help but consider the implications of his choice: the sharp young idealist, who would suffer no vulgar showmanship to sell or sully his art, would sooner descend to pragmatism than forego his feud. He would take the safest bet to extinguish the candle rather than risk allowing Reinhardt the pleasure of seeing him fail.

I watched as Walker reached both of his hands behind the skull, crossing his forefingers to create the apex of the triangle he then traced on the table with both fingertips, enclosing the skull within its boundary. Where his hands met again he made two fists, pressed them into each other for a moment and drew away, collecting himself in his chair with his back straight, his feet planted, his hands resting on his thighs. I did not have long to dwell on my notion that he resembled in this attitude some Egyptian prince carved in silent stone: soon I felt a change in the air—a cooling dampness, a brush of unseen mist past my hand and my cheek, raising gooseflesh on my arm—yet before I was satisfied in the nature of the sensation it was gone, dissipated in the heat of the fire.

I trembled slightly as it passed, but that was all.

The candle flame guttered, as if in the wind, and eventually went dark.

Walker unhooded himself again. Ashcroft quietly clapped.

As the candle burst back to life again, the force of Victor’s sorcery hit harder through my chest—foolishly unprepared this time as I was—than anything I had felt from Walker’s conjuration.

“A decent summoning, Walker,” Victor said, though I sensed no great interest in his voice, “given the constraints of my hall—enough to extinguish the candle, if only just. I have no particular advice as to technique, other than to suggest that you attempt the intrinsic arts as well, next time you find yourself in a position more conducive to your own experimentation.”

Had Victor reached the same conclusion on Walker’s choice of technique as had I? Yet there was no time to wonder—no time at all. My fleeting moments to prepare I had spent watching Walker summon; I can be forgiven, I think, for my interest, given that it was my initial firsthand observation (rather underwhelming though it was) of the summoning of a demon, yet in doing so I had all but forfeited my own prospects of success with the candle.

“Buckingham,” Victor’s voice rumbled in the warm air. “Your turn.”

“ Magia intrinseca , professor.” What would have been the brave choice for the others was for me nearly the default: though Victor seemed pleased by my early talents in summoning, I had never, to my knowledge, summoned anyone other than Victor himself.

“Good, Buckingham. Begin.”

Closing my eyes, I thought to summon the darkened state of the candle, as previously I had summoned Victor by the oak tree. Painting with my senses, I created the image in my mind: the darkness behind my eyelids, the curl of the burnt-black wick, the faint whiff of acrid smoke in the air and on my tongue. The thinned wax recongealing. The subtlest cooling of the heat on my skin?—

So I thought to try. But all I could feel was him.

The weight of his rapt attention ensnared me in its dark gravity, and I felt his shadow spread like vast wings of night, into me and through me, filling the hall with the deep perturbation of his touch. I did not need to open my eyes to know that his gaze burned into me; even in the company of six other men I could hear him breathe, him alone, and I thought that I could feel the subtle swell and fall of his formidable shoulders in the dark.

I wished that he would stop. Turn aside. Look away.

But that wish seemed as futile as it was false.

No. In truth I wished he would hold me thus indefinitely, and stop for nothing, and that I dared allow myself to sink into his shadow?—

My eyes flew open—only to meet his, their dark fire shining in the light of the candle that still burned on Friar Bacon’s skull.

“I suppose that should be all for this attempt,” I said quietly, “poor showing though it was. I apologize for my dearth of focus.”

The other students were unusually quiet.

Victor leaned back in his great chair with an air of vindication I did not understand. “Do not degrade your accomplishment, Buckingham. It is exceedingly unusual to produce so much as a single flicker upon one’s first attempt in class.”

“I should have been elated for a single flicker, professor.”

“Then I expect to see some sign of elation. Albeit subtly, the candle flickered twice.”

I felt a pang of vertigo to nearly match the sense of his art. “Twice,” I repeated after too long a pause, the very word now strange in my ear. “Twice, professor?”

“Correct. Surely you heard the various gasps and mutterings of your audience on the second occasion?”

“N—no, professor.”

“A pity, that.” He drummed his fingers once, idly, on the carven end of an armrest. “But, given that you were apparently so occupied as not to hear them, perish the notion that there is any fault in your focus . Good, Buckingham! Very good. Practice and experience will aid you, but do not let them dull your instinct. Reinhardt,” Victor turned from me at last, though slowly, “the stage is yours.”

I could scarcely remember to watch or listen, my curiosity as to how a stage magician like Reinhardt would approach true sorcery all but forgotten. The candle had flickered twice for me. This thought, and none other, consumed the entirety of my mind.

I had accomplished what Greycliff could not, and Lloyd could not, and Walker believed he could not and so dared not attempt.

Could this be right? Could this possibly be true? Had not Victor aided me somehow, contrived my success to justify my apprenticeship and uphold the unerring wisdom of his unusual choice of disciple? Surely someone—Ashcroft, at least—would have voiced some consternation if he had suspected deception, and perhaps that was the nature of the student voices I did not hear.

But surely, on the other hand, Victor could accomplish such a thing unnoticed if he wished. Who was to say that he had not quietly augmented my art with his own? Sorcery aside, he could have simply blown on the candle through the skull-like slits in his mask, after all, and no one would have been the wiser.

From the sounds of his exchange with Victor, Reinhardt had attempted magia intrinseca —a purposeful counterpoint, I suspected, to Walker’s conjuration—and the next turn fell to Forsythe. Intrinseca again. As Victor’s attention drew closer to Forsythe, I felt mine draw closer to Victor, watching him watch his student as I had before, endeavoring to sense his expectation.

The tall candle flame diminished—no more than a quarter of an inch—or so I thought that I observed. But Victor must have seen the same. He leaned forward in interest, shifting his weight in the darkness, and I wondered how Forsythe felt to be fixed beneath the unrelenting force of that gaze.

I did not have to wonder long: I watched as Forsythe seemed to shudder under his clothes and begin to sweat, a drop of perspiration rolling down the side of his jaw from the failing bear grease of his slick hair.

To be out from under the intensity of Victor’s regard, I thought to myself, might be some advantage.

To be not pushed to the precipice of that perilous cliff where now I dwelt, one step from free-fall into a doom I dared not name.

And yet, befitting one on such a precipice, I could not hold myself from the funereal fascination of looking down onto the grim rocks below. I thought of Victor again—and I thought again of my unaccountable dream the night after the oak. A shame, I mused to myself, that the vision had faded from my sleep before—my dream-consciousness inhabiting his body somehow—I was able to feel what it was like for him to cast a spell. Was the uncanny sensation of his magia intrinseca the same to him as it was to me? Beneath the black robes, the olive skin, the iron strength, did he feel the disquieting thrill of his own art through the core of his viscera, the marrow of his bones?

Belatedly, I remembered the candle. Somehow, Forsythe retained his tormented concentration; the tall candle flame atop Friar Bacon’s skull had dwindled during my reverie to little more than the size and shape of the slit pupil of a cat’s eye. A moment more, and surely Forsythe would succeed, the last of the flame darkening into a trail of smoke—but I heard him groan, straining at the last exertion of his will, and instead the flame began to slowly grow.

I heard a frustrated tsk from Reinhardt under his breath and a faint sound of disappointment, perhaps from Greycliff, somewhere to my right.

No matter. Forsythe’s struggle unable to hold my interest—though I was, admittedly, quite less than disappointed by his failure to extinguish the candle where I could not—I found my thoughts drifting once more to Victor, and in the strange fancies of my wandering mind I imagined for a time that I was Victor again. No more than a poor daydream, an idle exploration of the questions I had posed to myself a moment before: I molded in my mind the deep disquiet of his art, surging not into me but through me, moving with the heat of my own blood, ready and throbbing under the cold fire of my sharpened nerves. If I were he, I would need only turn that inexorable force of my attention and my will upon the flame—watch it rise under Forsythe’s slipping focus—and know, beyond all doubt, that my art would find the black wick cooling in the dark. I would murmur three times the same phrase, as often he did; the candle would not merely dim, as it was dimming again now (Forsythe evidently having regained himself), it would gutter and smoke as if caught in a sudden lash of wind?—

And then it did.

I blinked to clear my fantastical musings from my eyes, from my mind.

But the candle on the skull remained dark.

In an instant Forsythe sat up straight, his black-gloved fist falling solidly onto the table in triumph; Reinhardt and Greycliff applauded first, then the rest, and last of all Ashcroft, who conceded a few slow claps.

Was such a thing conceivable beyond simple coincidence? Mustn’t it have been happenstance, I asked myself, for my foolish fantasies to have independently culminated in the same moment that Forsythe mastered his magic?

I clapped politely, indulging myself in the notion that I did so to escape notice: to avoid drawing attention to this feat which—I could not shake the grip of the feeling—this feat I suspected may have been, at least in part, my own.

“Impressive, Forsythe. Not solely the success itself—a commendable accomplishment on its own, particularly after the exertions of the morning—but the recovery when your art began to falter. Now,” Victor turned back to the skull, and I braced myself; the blackened wick burst into new flame, blue and then orange, and the slowed surge of his art through me was longer this time, deeper, headier than before. My hand began of its own accord to clench the skirt of my black dress on the outside of my thigh, as if that would afford some balance, some connection to the earth—but the moment I believed myself able to endure it no longer, the sensation ebbed and passed. I did not know whether it more pleased or terrified me to contemplate whether it was meant to be a secret signal that he knew : an acknowledgement of what I had done to the candle on Forsythe’s turn, conveyed to me alone.

Let him know it then, I thought to myself. I was proud, after all, of such abilities as I had, and would not like—if I had indeed a hand in extinguishing the candle—for him to give Forsythe all the credit. Let Victor know that , and be satisfied that that is all, and never know the undertow of that nameless shift in the tide.

“Now,” Victor repeated, “Ashcroft. You may forfeit, Ashcroft, of course; that is after all an unfortunate act to follow.”

“I do not intend to forfeit, professor,” Ashcroft replied, his voice a mixture of mild indignation and resolve.

“Good!” Victor settled into his throne in satisfaction, leaning in more closely on his right elbow as he prepared to watch. “Begin, Ashcroft.”

“ Magia intrinseca , Doctor D’Arco. Fight fire with fire.”

Perhaps I was mistaken, after all. Victor continued with the last of the practicum as if nothing were nor had been amiss, and I understood no further indication that he suspected me of tampering with Forsythe’s attempt. Perhaps there was nothing to suspect: even among sorcerers, I imagined, it was possible for two unrelated events to coincide.

That notion was as much a disappointment as a relief. Forsythe had triumphed on his own. But I would not have to account to Victor for what I had done—how and why the tracks of my thought should have run so deeply strange.

And yet, unaccountably, my disappointment grew the greater. I should have liked to have put that candle out, even though, on my first try, I had made it flicker twice. A vaulting ambition, indeed: what more than two flickers, as a Novice Sorceress, should I possibly need to be satisfied?

“A reasonable attempt, Ashcroft,” I heard Victor say, and I knew then that I had missed nearly all of it—and that Ashcroft, like most of the others, had ultimately failed. “A rather strong attempt, in fact, given the situation.”

The candle still burned. A new trail of wax slid down Friar Bacon’s old cranium. From within the careful circle of his beard, Ashcroft’s face was impassive.

“Thank you,” he spoke plainly (and, I thought, somewhat humbled), “professor.”

“My advice to you, as ever, is to continue to pursue sensation over precision. This is not an admonition to unlearn —the rejection of knowledge is the very definition of a fool’s errand, proposed only by those who would manacle the mind—but to augment. Everything original which has ever been recorded in the annals of knowledge was written by the one who felt it first, before its reputation and recitation graced it with the genteel name of wisdom. The observations and intuitions of your predecessors are valuable, but they are not your own. The first is silver, the second gold. Supplement what you know with what you sense .” Victor turned, looking to the others and to me. “Advice to all of you. Any questions before we adjourn for the day, whether on this point or any other?”

Silence. To my left and my right, the other students glanced at each other sidelong.

For better or for worse—I felt myself breathe—after the uncanny confluence of Forsythe’s extinguished candle and my mental fantasies, I had made it to the end of class without incident.

“Hearing none,” Victor grunted, “you are dismissed.”

Amid the subsequent assortment of thank-yous, solemn bows of the head, and chafing sounds of wooden chair legs over stone, I felt Walker stand and take hold of my own chair back, preparing to help me rise.

“With the exception,” Victor added, “of Buckingham.”