Chapter 31 #2
‘From what I’m hearing,’ Colm said, ‘any arsehole with enough self-confidence could come up with his own system of magic, and it would be just as real and powerful as any.’
Fola burst out laughing. ‘It’s been known to happen, but rarely. Some people are capable of working themselves into delusion for the sake of power, but it’s easier to learn a system that makes sense. One that really convinces you.’
‘But if you know it’s just one of any number of systems, that means it’s not really real, doesn’t it?’ Siwan asked. ‘How can you really believe in something like that?’
Fola scratched her head. Bleed it, I am a poor teacher.
Arno would have been finished with this conversation already, and Siwan, Colm, Damon and Llewyn all satisfied.
As it was, the best she could do was try to remember her own lessons.
‘It’s like language, right? Every language is just random sounds, fundamentally.
’ She gestured to Colm, and in the birdsong tongue of western Goll, the common language of the City, she said, ‘Your member far exceeded my expectations. If not in scale, then in the skill with which you wielded it.’
Her audience stared back at her. Frog, too, stared. If she did not know him better, she would have taken his wide-eyed expression for moral incredulity.
‘For all you know, that was little more than gibberish,’ she said, returning to the melodic syllables of Alberon and Parwys.
‘But I know what it meant, so it carried meaning for me, and if I were to return to the City and say exactly what I just said to you … Well …’ She felt heat in her cheeks.
‘People would know what I meant. Which would reinforce the meaning I put into the words, strengthening the language and my confidence in it. Does that make sense?’
‘Sure,’ Damon said. ‘Kind of like acting. The difference between a shit performance and a great one is all in how it plays to the audience. You can’t really know for sure whether the choices you’ve made work or not until your first show.’
‘Exactly!’ Fola said. ‘But the more you act in front of an audience, just like the more you use a new language with other people who speak it, the more confidence you build. The more you understand what you’re doing, and believe in your own instincts. Right?’
Damon shrugged agreement. ‘So magic is just a performance?’
‘A very complicated one,’ Fola said. ‘And that complexity—that system—makes it powerful. If I just started waving my hands around and chanting, nothing would happen, because I know that’s all I’m doing.
But if I draw a thaumaturgic circle with the proper sequence of functions and symbols, it does what I intend, because I understand the system and know what I’m doing.
Just as if Afanan performed her ritual with an agate, according to the traditions she was trained in, she would know what it was meant to do, and so it would. ’
The court druid, who had stood by and endured this conversation with obvious disgruntlement, made an outraged snort and thumped her staff on the ground.
‘You talk of the old powers of the earth as though they are a thing created by mortal minds. Currency and language. Bah!’ she snapped in her reedy voice. ‘The count may have a high tolerance for blasphemy, but I have not.’
Fola only shrugged. ‘I’m only trying to explain things as I see them.’
‘And you reduce them to nothing.’ The druid shook her head, slapping her shoulders with the antlers dangling from her hair. ‘I’ll not stand for this. Let the count endure your madness, if he must allow it.’
‘I dunno,’ Colm rumbled as the druid stalked off towards the keep, thumping her staff with every step. ‘I sort of agree. All seems a bit loose. Looking at things all sideways instead of head-on.’
‘Maybe,’ Fola said. ‘And maybe we’re all looking at everything sideways—even the esteemed druid, there, despite her confidence—and it’s just better to know what your angle happens to be.’
‘Hold on,’ Damon jumped in. ‘What about your loupe? Doesn’t it show you the truth of magic? That’s how you figured out what Llewyn and Siwan are, isn’t it?’
Llewyn shot the boy a hard look. ‘There are ears here other than ours, boy,’ he muttered.
Damon nodded. ‘Sorry … but the point stands.’
Fola tapped the loupe on its chain around her neck.
That had been one of the hardest hurdles for her, too.
Understanding that even the things that served as evidence for her understanding of the world were, themselves, a part of that understanding.
There was no foundation anywhere. It was all like gazing into the aleph—only a matter of which layer of the infinite you chose to focus on.
‘It shows me something,’ Fola said. ‘And I’ve been well trained in how to interpret that something into meaning within the thaumaturgic system. Like squiggles on a page. Themselves, no more than ink on paper. Once you layer a language and a writing system over them, they can become meaningful.’
‘All very interesting,’ Llewyn muttered. ‘At least as a mental exercise. I don’t particularly see the usefulness in looking at the world this way.’
‘Think on this, then,’ Fola said. ‘The haunting itself is a result of trying to force people to look at the world one way, rather than another. The same squiggles on the page—Abal’s Scar, generations of tension with Galca and Alberon, vague tales passed down for generations of a tyrant king and his war.
But, rather than read in the language they were written, those facts were overlaid with a false one.
Repeat that false reading frequently enough, and people begin to believe it.
Over time, the truth is forgotten by all but a few.
Fortunately …’ She stood from the circle, having made the final symbol with a flourish.
‘The dead do not forget as easily as the living.’
‘For your purposes, maybe,’ Ifan called down from the stairs to the keep. ‘Less so for those of us they bear a grudge against. My druid says you are openly blaspheming and desecrating the World Clock. I presume your work progresses well, then?’
Fola laughed. Despite his gloominess, and the fact that he was a nobleman, she couldn’t help but like Ifan.
‘Nearly finished,’ she called back, gesturing to the design.
The count descended the stair and paced the circumference of the circle, surveying the design. ‘I must admit some nervousness. You are sure this will not damage the World Clock?’
Fola almost reassured him, but in truth it was impossible to say, given no one in the world really understood how an aleph worked. ‘It shouldn’t,’ she said. ‘I am only using it as a focus. Orientating the sun’s light through a lens to start a fire does no damage to the lens.’
He nodded, still uncertain. ‘Why not use the castle itself? Or one of any number of artifacts passed down from Barwon’s time?’
Loot taken from the conquered people of Glascoed, he did not say, but the implication hung in the air.
‘I intend to cast back nearly a thousand years,’ she answered. ‘How many times has the castle been repaired in that time? Or added to?’
His gaze flitted to the new towers and the palisade wall, and he begrudgingly nodded.
‘We anchor our memory in objects,’ she went on.
‘Just because an artifact has been passed down and become meaningful to us does not mean it was so meaningful to those who made and used it in its time. Longevity has a way of layering importance on to the mundane. But that,’ she pointed to the aleph, ‘was never meaningless, never unmemorable, to anyone who saw it.’
‘Fair enough, sorceress,’ he said. ‘I leave the matter to your expertise.’
Again, so difficult not to like the lad. A humble nobleman could almost sell the lie of nobility—that hierarchy was good, so long as the people who stood at its apex were good. That he stood there thanks to a buried history of brutal violence dispelled the glamour.
‘Stand back,’ she said, kneeling to make the final line. ‘Observe, if you wish, though there will not be much to see.’
Chalk scraped over stone, joining two symbols, completing the circle to conjure the memories of Glascoed’s ancient dead. Silver flames leapt from the chalk, curling into a mist that enveloped Fola and hung over the ground.
As that mist swirled, filling the space the circle had defined, a silhouette stepped through: Ifan, his knuckles white around the hilt of his sword, dark eyes wide and bright with terror.
‘I’m sorry, sorceress,’ he blurted.
Before Fola could answer—to call the boy count an idiot and a fool—the mist carried her into darkness. To Siwan, Llewyn and all the rest, she—and Ifan, the dolt—would simply be standing in the circle she had drawn, gazing at nothing, eerily still but for slow, steady breaths.
The darkness resolved into an empty expanse that stretched in all directions.
A twilight horizon broken only by the whirling aleph, the focus of her spell, and by the figure of Ifan—hazy, crackling like a flame, for he had stepped into the spell after its magic had begun to work and it had only half-taken.
‘What is this place?’ he said, his voice a hollow echo, falling from lips that moved faster than the words.
Fola snarled. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’
Ifan had the good sense to look abashed—at least, Fola read that emotion in the strange, shifting surface of his face. ‘I know I am a fool, but it is one thing to hear words from a dying man and another to see the truth with your eyes.’
‘What? My report wouldn’t be enough?’ She jabbed a finger at him—his form parted around it, as though she prodded mist. She grumbled. ‘Well, don’t blame me if things go sideways and you lose your bloody mind. This spell is no little conjuration, My Lord. It deals in memory. In the soul.’
He dipped his head. ‘As you say, sorceress. But I would not go through life unknowing.’