Daughter of Dragons

Chapter 7-4

“Come with me,” she said to Lathwi then. “It’s time for your first lesson.”

To Liselle’s vast surprise, the wards did not react when Lathwi set foot in the laboratory this time. She didn’t know how such a wonder had come to pass. Maybe the blood-oath was responsible. Or maybe Lathwi herself had undergone some sort of subtle change overnight. Regardless of the cause, though, Liselle was deliriously relieved, for it meant that Lathwi no longer posed a threat to her!

“Close the door,” she told Lathwi then. “It must always be shut when you work in here.”

“Why?” Lathwi asked.

“Because power attracts power.”

“Say again?”

Liselle sighed. She had hoped that someone who knew the Magic of Names would also have a passing familiarity with the basic rules of sorcery, but that was obviously not the case.

“Let’s sit over there,” she said, pointing to a nearby bench. “We need to talk about a few things.”

Lathwi did as she was told without question or comment. The look on her scarred face was intense, almost voracious.

“As I was saying,” Liselle began again, “power attracts power. This means that under normal circumstances, no magic can be performed without drawing the notice of other magical beings, be they human or otherwise. The Magic of Names might be an exception to this rule, but I doubt it. More likely, it’s simply too specific to generate noise on any perceptible scale.”

“Say again,” Lathwi said. A frown baffled her forehead now. “Too many words, not enough meaning.”

Liselle flashed her an embarrassed smile. “Sorry about that. Sometimes I get a little carried away. Just remember this: every time you use magic, you expose yourself to other sorcerers, not all of whom can be trusted. The greater the magic, the greater your peril; for as long as you are using sorcery, your mind is vulnerable to attack.”

Lathwi hissed, a sound of complaint. “What purpose be sorcery if no can use?”

“People use sorcery all the time,” Liselle assured her. “The smart ones take precautions beforehand. The most basic of these precautions are called wards.”

Lathwi glanced toward the door then. Liselle approved her memory with a nod.

“That’s right, those were wards you felt. I have two sets: the outer one prevents unfriendly magic from making its way into the house; the other encloses this room, and renders me and my sorceries silent. I tell you truly, Lathwi; this room is the safest place in the world for me. You’ll be safe here, too.”

Lathwi shrugged. Safety rarely concerned her unless her own was coming into immediate jeopardy. But she was curious about something else Liselle had said.

“You say you got wards one over other. So why you need close door before you make magic?”

Pieter was right, Liselle thought then. This woman was quick. And that was good to know.

“Only my inner wards are capable of silencing sorcery as it is taking place,” she explained. “Any magic which escapes this room will be perceptible. It will also stress the outer wards, for they were designed to keep magic out, not in. And if those wards are stressed beyond a certain point, they will collapse. From that moment on, everyone in the house will be vulnerable to whatever might want to come inside.

“I don’t want that to happen, Lathwi,” she said, with an ferocity born of secret fear. “Therefore, you will close the door to this room before you practice your lessons. And you will never, ever practice magic anywhere else in this house.

“Do you understand everything I’ve told you so far?”

Lathwi nodded.

“Good. Now, have you heard enough for one day or would you like me to continue?”

“Continue.”

“As you wish. But first you must tell me what you know about sorcery.”

“Sorcery be power to command forces that other men no can control,” she said then, quoting from the conversation that she and Pieter had had while on the road to Compara.

“Power and knowledge,” Liselle appended. “One without the other is useless at best and terribly dangerous at worst. And while I can teach you the lore, you must already possess the power to use it.”

That assertion intrigued Lathwi. To her, knowledge and power had always been one and the same thing.

“Tell more ‛bout power,” she urged.

“Well, for one thing, it stems from the Will—”

“What that be?”

Liselle raked her fingers through her hair as if hoping to find an answer among the strands. This was the first time she had ever been asked to define a notion that was so simple and yet so complex.

“The Will is an integral part of human consciousness,” she began, “and the driving force behind desire. In certain individuals, this characteristic is more developed than—”

Lathwi hissed, venting frustration. So many words, so little meaning! Not for the first time, she longed for the compact eloquence of dragon-speech.

“All right,” Liselle said, gathering up the scattered threads of her thoughts for another try. “Let’s consider a different approach. Think of the Will as mental muscle: the more you have of it, the stronger you are. And the stronger you are, the more forces you can manipulate—”

“Show me,” Lathwi demanded. “Easier to understand if I can see.”

“What a remarkably good idea,” Liselle exclaimed, a bit irked with herself for not having thought of it first. “And I’ve got the perfect exercise in mind. It’ll work best if we are sitting on the floor.”

Within the span of a blink, Lathwi was seated on the ground. The determined look in her blue eyes made her seem more fierce than usual. Liselle eased herself down next to her, then aimed a blunt-nailed finger at a shelf on the other side of the room.

“See that black jar over there?” she asked. “I want it. I want it more than anything else in the world, because it’s filled with diamonds and gold. The problem is, I can’t move my legs, so I can’t go over and get it.”

A sudden flash of greed encouraged Lathwi to get up and claim the jar’s contents for herself. But when she tried to act on the impulse, her legs remained stubbornly folded in a sitting position. She rumbled. This tiny woman was sneakier than she seemed to be.

“Oops,” Liselle said, letting hints of a smile skirt the corners of her mouth. “Did I fail to mention that you cannot move your legs, either? How forgetful of me.

“But never mind that, let’s get back to the jar. I must have it. I must have it now.” She stretched her arms toward the urn. Her eyes took on a distant glaze. “Fortunately, my Will needs no legs,” she said, a trace of strain in her tone. “Even as I speak, it’s speeding toward the jar. It cannot be seen or smelled or felt, but if you listen carefully, you may be able to hear it.”

Lathwi did hear a faint, almost musical sort of buzzing in her ears. But before she had a chance to concentrate on the sound, the sorceress spoke again.

“My Will is wrapped around the jar. Now I need only to recall it.”

The jar hopped into the air and began to glide across the room. Its flight was as smooth and steady as a summer breeze. Lathwi watched, slack-jawed with amazement, as it floated into Liselle’s outstretched hands.

“Now that I have the jar,” the sorceress said then, “I no longer want it. I want to put it back on its shelf. And because I still cannot move my legs, I must use the power of my Will to do so.

“Look into my mind now. Witness the jar’s flight from a different perspective.”

Lathwi did not need to be asked twice. With a deftness born of rabid curiosity, she slipped into the smaller woman’s awareness. An image of the jar was waiting for her there—a peculiar band of scintillating white light was wrapped around its throat. This band contracted, then surged forward. The jar began to fly again. Lathwi grinned. This demonstration was so much clearer than a jumble of words.

When the jar was safely back on the shelf, the band slid free of it and came zipping back into Liselle’s mind. There, it unravelled into a tangle of fragmented thoughts: pride and satisfaction; wonder and hope; an impression of some faceless menace. Before Lathwi could examine any of these threads in depth, a frosty blend of sound and thought pealed through her mind.

“Remove yourself,” it said.

Lathwi withdrew immediately, but only because she wanted to learn more about this Will-thing. Otherwise, she would’ve gladly spent the rest of the day and more exploring Liselle’s mind. It was, she decided, a thoroughly fascinating place.

“All right,” the sorceress said then. “Now it’s your turn. Give me your knife.” When Lathwi balked, obviously suspicious of the demand, Liselle ridiculed her with a look. “Did you think I was going to let you practice with my jars?”

That had been Lathwi’s precise thought, but she did not bother to say so. Instead, she tugged her not-claw free and handed it to Liselle. The sorceress got up then and started across the room. Lathwi tried to follow, but her legs still refused to budge.

“Now,” Liselle said, setting the blade next to the jar, “all you have to do to get your knife back is reach out and grab it with your Will. Try it.”

Lathwi pitched a confident thought at the not-claw. If Liselle could do it, she reasoned, then so could she.

Nothing happened.

“You’re not concentrating,” the sorceress informed her.

She tried again, then again and again, but met with no success. Liselle shrugged, then headed for the door.

“I’ll be back later to check on you,” she said. “At my knock, stop whatever you might be doing.”

“This be stupid exercise!” Lathwi protested. “Fetching and carrying be work for legs, not thoughts.”

“Perhaps,” the sorceress granted. “But do keep trying just the same.” As she started to close the door behind her, she added, “There will be no further lessons until you have mastered this one.”

The door snicked shut. Lathwi’s frustration turned to dread. What if she did not possess this Will-thing? What if fortune had abandoned her? A dragon with no fortune was no dragon, and a sorceress with no power was no sorceress. All she would be was a woman, soft and pink like prey.

She rejected these thoughts with a vehement hiss. She had power. She had concentration. And she had not come all the way to smelly Compara just to give up! She retreated to her memories then to review the day’s lesson. Will, Liselle had said, was the driving force behind desire. Will was also that peculiar band of light she had seen with her mind’s eye. As she shifted back and forth between these two perceptions, a key association lurched into place: that band was not one desire, but a whole host of them woven into a single adamant strand. Now she understood why she had failed. She had been concentrating on the wrong things!

Properly focussed now, she began to knit the bright white filaments of her desire into a whip-like cord. This cord was livelier than a dragon’s tail, and it fell apart whenever her concentration slipped, but she returned to it again and again until all of its loose ends were tucked away. Then, tingling with suspense, she aimed her new-forged Will at the not-claw. It raced past the boundaries of her mind and across the room, then curled itself around the knife like a fast-growing vine. An instant later, she recalled it with an enthusiastic mental tug. Only her cat-like reflexes saved her from being speared in the throat.

For one euphoric moment thereafter, all she could do was gloat. She had done it, her fortune was true! Now she could walk the paths of power. Then a critical inner voice started to decry her achievement. It had been clumsy. And careless. Liselle would not be impressed. And if the sorceress was not impressed, she would not share any more of her secrets.

So she set aside her glee and began to gather the ravels of her Will together again.

The not-claw was halfway back to the shelf when a knock at the door distracted her. The knife clanged to the floor. An instant later, Liselle strode into the room.

“Congratulations,” she said, when she spotted the fallen knife. “Some people take days to get that far. Others never catch on at all.”

Lathwi deflected the praise with a frown. “I be clumsy. Need practice more.”

“You’ve done enough for one day,” Liselle told her then. “Sorcery is draining work, especially for beginners.”

A protest swelled within Lathwi. There was nothing strenuous about playing thought-games! And she did not want to quit just yet. But even as she opened her mouth to voice these complaints, she realized that her brow was beaded with sweat. Moreover, the dull ache in her stomach was not due to hunger pangs.