A surfeit of wizards 7

 

Chapter 7

 

“Of course, you need to know what I know about the Braidfleet School,” said Florisin. “If we’re going by rug I can fill you in on some basics on the way.”

I thanked him, and settled on my rug of travel, thankful that it had weather repelling charms on it. The year had rolled round far enough that the odd flurries of snow were not uncommon, especially as we neared the coast.

“I love travel by rug,” said Florisin. “Warm and cosy, with an indoor toilet rising at need, such a useful rune, and feeling terribly smug about how miserable other people below us must be.”

“I had no idea there was a built-in toilet,” I said. “Uh… does it open up below?”

“For goodness sakes boy! How cleanly would that be, and how popular would it make wizards?” said Florisin. “Built in charms of dismissal so if it goes anywhere in the inhabited plains, it rains on demons, and I don’t care about offending them. Same as the box of cleansing before you leave, which deals with any dirt and disease on your hands. Very compact!”

I agreed.

As a young boy, I had never felt a need to relieve myself during travel, and Harmon seemed equally impervious to the call of nature. 

“That will be very useful when we have children,” said Chessina, happily.

“Braidfleet School! The last principal was a complete nutter,” said Florisin. “He was terrified of dying, and was researching ways of living forever.  According to his journal, if I recall correctly, he was trying to become a lich.”

“What is a lich?” I asked.

“Strictly speaking, a dead body, in the old language. But in real terms, it means a body into which the soul and spirit have been rebound, to make an undead body which, providing its phylactery is kept safe, is almost impossible to destroy.”

“And he made himself into this unkillable thing?” I said, in horror.

“No, he never succeeded,” said Florisin. “But he had spoken to Agravation about it, wherein the interest to you.”

I had no hesitation in recognising ‘Agravation’ as ‘Agravar.’ It seemed a good nickname to me.

“If it was nasty, he was interested in it,” I said. “I’ll be upfront.  Chessina and I went on a quest to the place of waiting, where her soul, or Shareen’s soul, if you will, was trapped, while her… spirit, I suppose, had been in the Abyss. And her bones were kept by Agravation, a name I like for him. We want to know why. Her soul was trapped using a soul-trapping mirror, and then dumped out, somehow, while her… essence, spirit, whatever was enslaved.  I suppose because her body would have been too frail to survive the… enjoyments of the demon involved.”

“The Agarakians described it first,” said Florisin, sitting back to get comfortable for lecture mode. Both Chessina and I recognised it, and relaxed to listen, since the old man was wise and experienced and we could both learn a lot from him. “They believe the essence of humanity outside its body to be broken into three parts; the soul, the spirit, and the ghost, described as the body double.  As far as I have discovered, this is true to a point. The soul is the seat of all that is our belief and houses what, for want of a better word, I describe as the conscience.  A young girl deprived of her soul, her sense of self-worth, would be susceptible to being corrupted utterly, doubtless to the amusement of the demon involved.”

“That more or less sums it up,” said Chessina, softly, clinging to me. I slid an arm around her and scowled at the old man.

“If we want to solve this, I can’t afford to be tender about your feelings, Journeywizard,” he said, apologetically.

“No, you need to be clinical about it,” said Chessina. “But it’s odd, when I ended up with Castamir, it was as if he gave me a conscience.”

“Ah!” Florisin perked up. “Awakening the innate connection to your soul. Fascinating! And plainly Arcana at work here, to overcome the terrible travesty of what happened to you.”

“Fortunately, being bereft of a conscience, I did not suffer too much mentally in the Abyss,” said Chessina.

“And that’s why he did it, I imagine,” said Florisin. “Possibly partly to see if it was possible, but also because, as I understand it, souls taken by demons in the intact tripartite form do not last long, because the horrors of what they see and have to do causes their souls to be torn and damaged, and they usually die, if they can manage to effect that before their souls are too ravaged, or they just fall apart and fade, dragging the spirit and the ghost with them into… I surmise… limbo, not being sufficiently intact for a god to claim.”

I shuddered.

“Demonologists are idiots,” I said.

“It’s a synonym,” said Florisin, with a shrug. “I did some planes walking to find out what happened to some of the teachers at that damned school; my master was interested, and where he went, I went. So, I know a bit about what it is like, though my master made sure we were protected, and with an artefact which dragged us back to our summoning circle if activated. I must look it out for you; I assume you’ll be going after the fellow who has been causing all the trouble. I know a couple of syllables of his name.”

“We know seven,” said Chessina. “And we have a dwarf-made knife with a body part and all syllables imbued in it.”

“That should do it,” said Florisin. “I’ll write what I know later; you probably covered it. I did wonder whether the bones were kept with the intent of building a simulacrum body because Agravar wanted a debauched version of his sister to play with; and… the demon…”

“Fishface. We call him Fishface,” said Chessina.

“Fishface… good, but remember that the epithet becomes also a part of his true name if used as a verbal identifier, even if he does not know it,” said Florisin.

“Verbal identifier! It’s a wizard thing!” said Chessina, giggling wildly.  “Castamir first asked me if I had a, ‘er… verbal identifier’ by which I wanted to be known. He was pompous then, but he grew out of it.”

I was beetroot.

“Oh, all young men are pompous at some point,” said Florisin. “Those of us with ineffable wit and charm grow out of it,” he winked at me. “Dragovar took longer than some, he felt his position too keenly, when I retired. Tasayne has been very good for him.”

“Thank you,” said Chessina. “I did matchmake, after all.”

“Good girl,” said Florisin. “Celibacy is bad for wizards. It makes their magic muddy and it has no outlet.  I suppose an active hobby could replace it, but there’s nothing like a good shag.”

“I did wonder if there were runes about the chest where her bones were kept which prevented Emaxtiphrael from getting a hold on Shareen’s soul to pass it on,” I said. “I want to look at the chest; we were a little pressed for time, and had other fish to fry. Or even,” I punned, “Another Fishface to fry.”

“It’s a theory,” said Florisin. “And well-worth looking. The books and writings which survived the end of the school were split. Some of those deemed safe went to the Royal Academy of Wizards; some went into the Royal Library; and the most dodgy stuck to the fingers of my master, and are in my own collection. I suspect we’ll all be living in my library for a while. Don’t worry; I have invisible servants. It’s just that it’s an honour to be a servant to the Royal Wizard, and nobles split a gut to get their offspring into such positions.”

“That’s a security risk,” I said.

“I poisoned all mine with a truth serum and made them talk about their loyalties,” said Florisin. “Less intrusive than reading their minds, though I learned a few things I wished I had not.”

“Let me guess; mostly to do with their sexual fantasies,” said Chessina.

“Spot on,” said Florisin. “I was too traumatised to use my staff for a couple of years.”

“He’s exaggerating,” I said.

“Well, yes, but it makes the point,” said Florisin. “We should be nearly there.”

“Yes, there’s the River Braid,” I said.

“Nice work with the runes,” said Florisin. “I always wondered how much the tower helped Harmon and Morin, his predecessor. Well, not so much Morin, he was hard put to walk and eat street food both at the same time, but Harmon made some extraordinary things look effortless. Essentially, the Tower is a demi-god and gives you the boost you need to be its agent, if I have that correctly.”

“I don’t discuss my relationship with the Tower,” I said, stiffly.

“No, and quite right too. Please excuse a nosy old wizard; I’m not making my aid and knowledge conditional on you sharing confidences with me. I just like to know things.”

“I am not going to ask you not to speculate,” I said. “But I won’t confirm or deny.”

We came in to land, and did so at Agravar’s house. We were going to stay there rather than with Sir Tasseder, as we felt an urgency to research, and being polite to a host would take time. We could call and see him on the way back, perhaps.

“We left all his papers, writings, and books intact to come back to later,” I told Florisin. “Or rather, we took them initially to Sir Tasseder’s house, but it’s a wizard’s house again, and so JourneywizardCeslin is in charge of them. He’s been going through Agravar’s diaries to make restitution to those he wronged where possible.”

Ceslin came out.

“Castamir! Chessina… Master Florisin?” he said.

“Just Florisin,” said Florisin. “We need to find out if Agravation made any notes about soul magic.”

“Extensive ones,” said Ceslin. “He was talking about someone he called an old fool who was, apparently trying to become an undead, binding his soul back into his own body. The snag was, that you can’t do it to yourself. But Agravar made notes and wrote down the spell he was using.”

“That’s it,” said Florisin. “That was what was missing from the school records, the books containing the spell, and the overt mentions of it in the diaries of Pondichook.”

“Pondichook, really?” I said. “I’d want to die in a hurry, not live forever.”

“It was bestowed upon him by his master, and he grew into it very successfully,” said Florisin.

“I could not take a lich named Pondichook seriously,” giggled Chessina.

I knew what she meant.

“Agravar didn’t take him seriously, either, but he wanted something from the spell he used to separate the soul out into its component parts,” said Ceslin.

“That’s it,” I said. “That’s what we need to read.  Fishface destroyed what he thought was every record of the spell, but he reckoned without Agravar’s compulsive record-keeping urges.”

Ceslin got us all tea, and a sweet tart made with syrup which Chessina plainly wanted the recipe for, but the knowledge about her own bones was more pressing even than her culinary ambitions.

 

Agravar had written down the spell, which for obvious reasons I will not write about. I don’t think it’s necessary or relevant outside of the particular context we had of needing to know what had happened to Shareen/Chessina. And anyone who wants to know it should seriously consider seeking help with one of the mind-healers of Selene.

“This is the spell the old fool thought would help him to be a Lich. Plainly he has misunderstood as it should be clear to anyone not a drooling idiot that one cannot cast such a spell on oneself. He claims to have got it from some Agarakian text or other, and to have worked through changes to it to make it his own. It certainly splits the soul into soul, intellect, and soul-image, which is what is needed. With the soul trapped in the mirror, casting this spell on the mirror should then bring forward the soul-image and intellect for Its-sek, who will then grant me tremendous power for my sister.  I would have liked to have deflowered her myself, but being a virgin makes the sacrifice more powerful.  I have lined the chest with the substance he has given me, to break connection irrevocably between soul and body and make the action irreversible. I am looking forward to this so much. The anticipation is almost sexual in its intensity.

Its-sek has ordered me to give him the old fool’s spell book to destroy, but of course, I will know what to do another time if he requires it of me, and with the spell written down, I cannot then forget how to do it.”

“Well, shit,” said Chessina. “I wonder what the lining of the chest is.”

“That will wait for the morning,” I said. “A shame the spell book is gone so we cannot find the spell’s source.”

“I fancy I have the old fool’s journals,” said Florisin.  “And if he followed standard practise he should have written out any new spell and dissected it mathematically before considering using it, which is for private journals, and not for the spellbook, as it would make any spellbook impossibly thick.  The ignorant call a spellbook a grimoire, but that isn’t strictly true. The grimoire is the body of supporting research around a spell, not its final form.”

“Oh!” said Chessina. “Well, chest first; and then your library.”