a surfeit of wizards 6

 

Chapter 6

 

I was privileged to watch Dragovar in action using tact and diplomacy. He let me loiter by the door whilst he talked to Frigermar.

“Frigermar,” said Dragovar, “I need a signal service, and you’ve been recommended to me as ideal for the task.”

Frigermar sighed, and picked up a pen.

“What do you want me to source, and where do you think it might be?” he asked.

“More important than that,” said Dragovar. “Look, I don’t want to drag up painful memories, but did you feel you were let down at all at school, and not permitted your full potential? I have reason to ask.”

“Well, that is dragging up a painful memory or several,” said Frigermar. “Yes, I do feel I was let down. I know I’m a talented librarian but I could have been more; I could have saved more texts if I had been permitted classes outside of my field in Alchemy and Potioneering. I don’t say Master Evdokar did not do his best, because he did, and I have every respect for him, but I needed more than potions and alchemy, and I failed by researching on my own the things I now use every day and neglected the aspects of potioneering which did not interest me. And yes, I know it was my own stupid fault, but I was so near a breakthrough in making a potion which does the same as the spell elucidate text but more gently, and which could be painted on in spots with a paintbrush. You know the spell can make really old documents clear, and then crumble to dust.  My potion also permitted damaged portions to bond to a new parchment beneath it, and sink the words onto the new sheet.”

“But Frigermar! Why were you failed? That’s a master-level piece of work!” said Dragovar.

“Because I couldn’t, in the exam, produce a potion to make a man’s voice falsetto, nor could I answer half the alchemy questions because I have no interest in metallurgy,” said Frigermar.

“In Agarak, they use steel styluses to dip in ink, not goose quills,” said Dragovar. “Researching the perfect nib might have been useful.”

“But nobody told me that, then,” said Frigermar.

“Nor, I suppose, did they explain that the potion to turn a man falsetto has a tricky little stirring pattern which comes in useful, once having learned it, in more advanced potions,” said Dragovar. “Well!  If you’ll do my favour for me, we might yet see you advanced to potions master, and publishing your research for academic acknowledgement as well as being invaluable to the king and to me. Mind, by the time you’ve finished, you’ll be glad of your nice, quiet library. I’ll have my apprentices fill in, and if you don’t want to return, you can train someone up.”

“What is it you want?”

“I want a man capable of taking cogent notes, with understanding of wizardry, auditing every class in the Royal Academy, because there need to be changes in many of the teaching methods there – as we uncovered just in a morning’s visit,” said Dragovar, grimly.

“It’ll be a pleasure,” said Frigermar, flexing his fingers in malicious anticipation. “Who recommended me?”

“The Towermaster,” said Dragovar.

“He’s setting me up to fail; he doesn’t like me,” said Frigermar.

“No, actually, he isn’t,” said Dragovar. “He loves magic, and he loves Arcana, as we all do, and he wants the best for young wizards. He would have been the first to recommend you have a specially devised program for your interests. And perhaps one of the things needed is the flexibility to have special programs, or career paths, which crossover the schools of magic, and are negotiated in the fourth or fifth year. Had you known you could pick up other skills on a special program in the fifth year, would you have knuckled down to the generalised skills in the fourth?”

“Yes, I might well have done,” said Frigermar.

“Well, complete your fourth year’s study alongside the auditing, and I’ll see you made counsellor for combination courses,” said Dragovar. “I have to have a conference with the leading wizards… and priests, I suppose… but if we already know what needs changing and are ready to implement it, those fatuous fools can be talked into agreeing that something must be done, and will be pleased with themselves that we already done it, as they will think it was all down to them.”

Frigermar gave a reluctant laugh.

“This is why you are Royal Wizard,” he said. “Manipulative to a fault.”

“Yes,” said Dragovar. “And more than willing to take lessons from Journeywizard Chessina. Don’t be fooled by someone’s rank; there are plenty of people with specialised knowledge who don’t have the paper to declare them grand master. Like you.”

Frigermar bowed his head.

“Perhaps the Towermaster and his former apprentice will let me start again; I wasn’t having a good day, and they were looking at what seemed like frivolities.”

“I can tell you now, it was far from such,” said Dragovar. “Chessina had long been a prisoner in the abyss, and they needed lore which had become mere tales, but with enough truth to be a guide to save her soul. I imagine, if you ask nicely, Castamir may let you take a copy of the original, hand-written scroll of the Book of Djehuti.”

He was almost salivating when I came forward with my hand held out to shake his.

He would do an excellent job.

“My father might finally be proud of me,” he said.

“Excuse me, shouldn’t any man be proud of a man with your achievements and the trust you are given as Royal Librarian?” I found myself saying.

“I was the weedy one, never good enough,” said Frigermar. “When I displayed magic, he thought I might be a battle wizard, but he says…” he burned red.

“Oh!” I said, softly. “One of those who thinks you can’t be a real man if you aren’t a brainless meat-head with a tendency to throw his fists.  Did he beat on you?”

“Yes.”

“I despise men who beat on women and children,” I said. “First thing I had to do when we got back from the Elven lands was to sort out a drunken wife-beater. Chessina made a doll for a little girl in the village, and threatened her father if he sold it for booze.  Well, when we got back, there was Aritsa crying for her baby and Gar out of his mind on booze. Fortunately he’d sold it to a local man for his daughter, and Chessina was able to make another one for the little girl whose gift it was to be, and get Aritsa her doll, while I went and collected Gar.” I scowled. “And his stupid wife begging me not to hurt the man, because he luuuurved her really, and she needs a man about the place. So, I asked her why she didn’t get one then, as Gar plainly wasn’t one. I let him hurt his hands on a hard skin spell, which was still in action for me to bring him to sobriety, the skin on my knuckles also being hard. I gave him four choices; leave the village after a divorce; let me place a geas upon him that drinking more than the equivalent of three pints of ale would make him puke up; become a nanny-goat so he at least gave his children milk; or become a woman, also after a divorce.”

“What did he choose?”

“Stupid punk chose to be a woman; he thought he could get his rocks off feeling himself up,” I said. “Well, a woman without a husband and no job has very few options. And once he was a woman, he no longer was big and beefy, and his ex-wife’s brother decided to show him what life was like for a woman in an abusive relationship. It took three days for him to beg me to make him male again and geas him to curtail his drinking.”

Frigermar laughed.

“I’ll imagine my father as a woman; that will help,” he said.

“I can teach you the hard skin spell,” I said.

“Yes! Yes, please,” he said.

 

Next time I saw Frigermar, he had a black eye, and an air of satisfaction. I heard that a Baron Verril had retired from court after a most humiliating and sudden illness. A little digging discovered that his baroness had died after accidentally falling downstairs when pregnant, and lay there overnight, in labour, without anyone being the wiser. If Verril died of his wounds, nobody was likely to weep.

 

oOoOo

 

While Dragovar was setting up various meetings, Chessina and I had the ‘fun’ of decorating our new house.

No, let me be honest here.

Chessina was having genuine fun, decorating the house, and I was hiding from the decorating, setting up various gates. The main one was to the Tower and back, of course, for rapid travel to the capital, and I used it to pop back to see how Aritsa and her mother and siblings were doing, now I had moved them into another cottage, in charge of the small home farm of the Tower. Home farm! It sounds a bit grand for an acre and a half, but it covered our home’s needs, including those of Elizelle and her retinue. And I had a gift for Elizelle, which was a teething toy, a beautiful thing of ivory, carved in the semblance of an elf. It resembled the late King Sereneryr.

I rather liked the idea of my foster daughter chewing and slobbering on a semblance of the nasty fellow.

I checked in with Orgey Spint, my spy.

“I thought you was in the capital, Towermaster?” he said.

“I was,” I said. “I popped back with a few errands.”

“By the gods, magic is wonderful,” said Orgey. He was a rare fellow; a non-magical person who was genuinely fascinated by magic, and filled with wonder, not fear. “Any chance I can come and work in the Tower at some point?”

“I’ll build you a place of your own, when I’ve figured out what’s going on with the idiots involved around Harmon’s death,” I said. “I could use a human handyman and messenger, and, at times, someone not afraid to use a magical gate to check up on my house in the capital. And report back to me.”

He looked pleased.

And well he might; he’d spend most of his time in idle luxury – luxury from his point of view, in any case – but the times when I needed a human to interact with village folk would make him invaluable, as he had no more than a healthy fear of magic. And having someone to just show up as being in residence of the house in Adalsburg would be useful, too.

And the gate to my tower was to an outhouse which resembled a jakes, three steps from a back door which only appeared on command, so it wasn’t like I was letting him into our sacrosanct space.

He could, after all, be charmed.  One had to be vigilant about such things. However much I actually liked him.

“Bertor has gone back to the city, learning that you were going there,” he told me.

Bertor? Oh, yes, the one who married Lady Renilla’s cousin and discovered he had a pig in a poke – or a hag in a whore, to be more accurate – when she aged incredibly after Chessina and I got rid of their demonic little playmate.

“Did he take his wife?” I asked.

“No, word is she is not well,” said Orgey.

“How sad, my heart bleeds. Well, anyway…” I said.

Orgey laughed.

“She’s a good example of why not to dabble in demonology,” he agreed.

 

I also set up – with Dragovar’s permission – a gate to an excrescent room he added to his tower, outside the wards – a sort of oubliette.  I pointed out that it might be useful if he or I could come and go without anyone being any the wiser, and he saw the point immediately.  It came out in a room which had a password to reveal the door, at which a drop of the blood of those permitted to use it would open it. Wizards are cautious. The password worked the other way, too. Anyone else would be left there until Dragovar investigated, but this also left it open for any of my people to arrive in a panic with news. Or for Dragovar and his people to escape if there was any trouble.

Don’t tell me that King Beremar is universally loved, and those he trusts are trusted. There are always crazies who want to disrupt the status quo, and I was decidedly nervous to learn that Duke Brandel had an arrogant snob of a wizard for an uncle who might just have friends who thought that Dragovar and the royal family were surplus to requirements.

You know what I always say. Caution is good. Constant vigilance.

What, you thought I was going to say the same old thing about wizards being cautious? It may be true, but I want you on your toes and learning from this.

 

oOoOo

 

Former Royal Wizard Florisin looked like a pickled walnut, but almost every line on his face looked as if it had been made with laughter. The rest of his lines looked like the sort of strain nobody should have to be under.

“So, you’re Castamir!” he said. “Harmon said you’d turn out to be something special; he said one of those chimes rang when you chose your name.  I understand you and Dragovar are familiar with those chimes nowadays?”

“Extremely,” I said.

“Interesting times,” said Florisin. “Call me Florisin; I don’t stand on ceremony except with fools, and most of those are dressed in robes too tight to fart in without splitting them, or the thickness of a flea in their armpits from the affectation of carrying a dead sheep around on a cord round their necks.”

“They’re called ‘muffs,’ Florisin,” said Dragovar.

“You can call them what you like, dear boy, but I keep waiting for them to bleat with more coherence that the ones wearing them,” said Florisin.

“I love you already, Master Florisin,” said Chessina. “Castamir is going to be just like you as he ages.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me if I was your great grandfather,” said Florisin. “I eloped with a girl from Stonebridge just before all the problems in Braidfleet, and her father caught up with us. She cried a lot and decided to go home, because I was only an apprentice who probably wouldn’t amount to anything, and she couldn’t stand the shame. It gave me a rather cynical outlook on life.” He beamed. “Mind, I met a Mistress Kettle, who was a fine potion-maker, I believe our daughter works at the hall for Sir Tasseder.”

“And her grandson, Chez, is in the Royal Academy and you should really get to know him; he’s a very bright child,” said Chessina.

“Really?  I’ll look him up,” said Florisin. “That makes him your cousin, Castamir. I hope you’ll take him as an apprentice in due course.”

“If Dragovar doesn’t,” I found myself promising. He was family! I had real family as well as the family I had built for myself!