From alt.pub.dragons-inn Fri Apr 21 12:47:36 1995 Xref: netcom.com alt.pub.dragons-inn:8353 Path: netcom.com!csus.edu!decwrl!pa.dec.com!nntpd.lkg.dec.com!leggy.zk3.dec.com!orb!not-for-mail From: hutch@agora.rdrop.com (Steve Hutchison) Newsgroups: alt.pub.dragons-inn Subject: [Story Buyer] Apprentice Inept: Convocation Date: 21 Apr 1995 01:42:22 -0000 Organization: Duchy of Wabesylvan Obspauk Lines: 447 Sender: news@Orb.Nashua.NH.US Message-ID: X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL23] Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Aa'rden had just finished copying down a story from a farmer whose crops had been a little unusual this spring, and he was thirsty and a little tired, not to mention uncomfortable. So, he signalled for one of his stand-ins to come up from his room, and made his way to the washroom. When he came back from his ablutions, his stand-in was sitting, not quite stiffly, but motionless, while seated at the table across from him was the tallish, black-robed, hooded figure that had come in two weeks earlier. The being looked up at Aa'rden and a faint violet reflection came from two eyes deep in the hood. The story buyer shook his head and walked with careful measured steps through the busy Inn to his table. He dismissed the stand-in (which vanished with a faint *pop*) and sat in the place it had vacated. "Sorry," the hooded figure said. "My fault, I'm afraid. I was curious what it was, and it got confused and went static." "That's all right. They don't usually last very long around here." Aa'rden looked at the tabletop. His copy book was open to a new page, and the heading had been started. "Did you agree on terms?" he asked. "Same as last time," the figure answered. A hand reached under the robe, drew forth a hefty, leather-bound black tome, and with a hand that was also covered by fine kidskin gloves, opened to a new page. "Right. Two silver wheels for today's entry and what was it, a cup of fresh fish and a glass of brandywine?" "No," the voice replied. "Two cups of fresh raw fish or meat. Mead would be better than brandywine. Oh, and I'd like two raw eggs today." The waitress, a young red-haired lass, had come by as he was speaking, and she nodded to Aa'rden and ran to prepare the food. Aa'rden smiled, and pulled the journal towards himself, opening the cover. He began to read. --- --- --- Apprentice Inept Convocation By: Fox Cutter Steve Hutchison -- The Journal of Frinklan the Obscure -- '95 may 7ith Travel from place to place used to be easier. We still have the old roads, the freeways and superhighways and railroads, here in the Northwest. They've been choked by weeds in places, and in the mountains they don't always go thru any more, but it's worse in the middle where the old Bible Belt used to be. So many people vanished there during the Disappearances, that they didn't have enough workers to keep the roads repaired, and that contributed to the breakdown. There are still a few airports, but with only three working oil refineries in the world, the planes only fly for the rulers of the cities -- everyone else walks, if they don't have the magic to fly with. Yes, there are a few people around who know how to weave flying carpets, but they have to be woven in with their own fur, and the spells are hard to operate. So they're still rare. Besides, carpets aren't all that aerodynamic. It turns out, though, that hang-gliders and hot-air balloons are still useful, if there are wind-workers who can steer and keep the craft aloft. Basic cheap transportation, though, that's gone back to basics. Feet, paws, and hooves. That or swim; I like swimming, but I'm an Otter, and thus adapted for the job. My prentice Foxeris, oddly enough, is a Fox, and I don't hold much hope for him being able to swim -- but he'll be learning how in a few days. We're going to the Columby, the local Mother of Rivers. She's only five days away by horseback if we follow the old road through the Ash Desert. With three volcanoes spitting out ash every five or so years, the plains down from Smoke Can are pretty fertile, but also hard to live in. There are still farmers down there, and some work goes into getting them enough water to grow crops for Smoke Can and for S'attel, even some for export. I know a few of them. I did some weather work for Honor and Duty Farms. Honor is a wolf, his mother Duty is a bear, but they've both shown a real knack for making things grow. They'll be our stop three days out, give us a chance to wash the ash off our fur and clean the grit out of our eyes. Oh yeah. Travel agenda. See, I'm going to meet Alex Harloon in Dales, and we're going to get plastered together. I fully expect to be hung over for a week. There's a reason for this. Alex has a knack that I need -- whenever I meet him he brings me trouble. The last two years have been pretty boring, and when you're a Karma Wizard, boring is bad. I ran out of cash, had to resort to working for hire. Ordinary stuff. Well, thing is, without something interesting to work on, my Wizard talent kind of causes problems for other people, and two of the last three jobs did not go well. Thus my decision to accept an apprentice. Apprentices, you see, are trouble. They can't help it; it's one of the rules of magic that an apprentice will blow things up and curdle milk and set fire to the drinking water, that sort of thing. Of course, when the rules were written, they didn't know about Foxeris. (Pay attention, kit, I'm talking about you!) Let me describe to you what happened yesterday when he was learning "foxfire" -- something that he should be able to do with very little effort. You may recall, I have to try to teach him something about magic at least once a day, hence this journal. I write in it, he reads it, he writes in it, I read it. He learns about magic and history and consciousness from me, and he learns to express himself in a coherent way, and I learn about him. I think I'm getting ahead of myself. One feature of a journal is that it covers time in a mostly linear fashion, just as the ritual parts of a spell are unfolded in a linear fashion. So, to make a bent story straight... After the spell took, anchoring us each to the other in a much more constrictive Apprenticeship bond than was really necessary, Foxeris went off to tell his parents about the problem, while I prepared a happy little surprise for Foxeris' dear friend Canron and his charming parents. You see, I'm not just a Magician, I'm a Wizard. Magicians are restricted to what Nature permits. Wizards are not. Wizards can break the laws of chance, of physics, of causality, of reason. Even in the old days they knew better than to mess with Wizards. It seems that one Canron and his Weasel parents need to be reminded of this. The first thing I did was to anchor the whole framework to the Geas that they slipped into the Apprenticeship spell. The part on me, that is. It's a professional insult, you see. A young, unwilling student can be bound by Geas for a time, but not the teacher. To add insult to insult, tradition says you do not make the Geas unbreakable. At least, the teacher is supposed to be able to break it. Some students just don't work, some pairings just don't work. So while the Geas stands, my own framework stands attached to the ones who drafted it. They're better Magicians than I am, in their specialty, but Magicians is all they are. They won't be able to tell the framework is there, unless they can find another Wizard who works my Style, and Roanoke lives in SudAmer with the Llamas -- we try to keep clear of each other. Feedback. Second thing I did was to find out why they were so adamant about it being a four-year stretch. I had to call in a couple favors to find out why, and it was worth it. So, Canron and his parents are going to spend a lot of time together. Far too much time together. I wonder how long it will take them to figure it out. That was what I built onto the framework -- a happy chain of circumstances and coincidences, The third thing I did was to ask one of my less pleasant acquaintances to watch them and keep me up to date on their predicament. It probably won't let them know it's watching. No need to make them more miserable than they make themselves. Yet. Enough gloating, though. Back to the narrative. Foxeris went to tell his parents about the little accident we'd gotten ourselves tangled in, and they were somewhat upset, but after we had dinner that night, I let them know that I would be doing my best to teach their son Magick, and that he'd be under my protection during our travels. They didn't seem terribly upset, which may be a matter for discussion between my young prentice and me at a later date. Family are very important. I know they must have their differences -- him being a Fox and them being a Panther and a Tigress. We took a day getting horses and finding a Caravan for the trip down the cliffs and to the Ash Desert. That cost me a chunk of my silver, too. The horses have to be warded against ash-lung disease, and we have to wear filters and face guards once we get past the cliffs. Too bad we can't make the horses wear filters. But, the spell to compel them would break their spirits, and the ones that are trained are all owned by the Caravan companies. But what good being a Magician if you can't keep a little dust out of such a large place, eh? The trip down the Cliffs was steep and nasty. When Hood and Jefferson decided to start spouting ash, they were less violent than their sister in the Old Days. The people living near them talked the Earth Dwellers into going gently, not detonating their mountains all at once, but there was a cost. The fault-plane mountains in the east, the Rockies, started growing faster, and they spread. Without their own magick, the people of Smoke Can would have gone the way of some of the smaller towns, jumbled and tossed as the ground shot upwards several feet in a month for ten years. They kept it from falling apart, but the result was a series of really vertical cliffs, which eventually had narrow roads carved into them. They're passable most of the year. I took the long way to get there, though, and this was my first experience with them. Well, after two days of just teaching the Fox to meditate, the damned Geas kicked in, and after I lost my lunch twice, I decided I better teach the kit how to do his first real Magick. He's been getting better with the journal. At least, he tells a coherent story, even if he can't put his words together in the right order. Or spell. And why he chooses some of the words he uses ... oy! Anyway, he's able to put together a story in sequence, and there's some promise there. So I decided to teach him "Foxfire", like I said -- a simple spell that he already had the hooks for. The reason he has to express himself coherently has to do with the way that Magick works. First off, once you get past the little cantrips that everyone knows, the everyday stuff, you get to the stuff that has some meat to it. Not just bribing the local fey-folk -- I mean the real Magick that takes Nature and guides it into harmony with Will and Intent. It takes more than just Will -- no matter what the old cranks and crackpots said in the Old Days. You have to know, very precisely, what you want, and you have to give it shape through carefully chosen words and symbols, or when you put the Power behind it, you wind up with something sloppy and shabby and ready to fall apart at the first touch of Chaos. And that's where the problem came yesterday. Foxfire is just a mild fluorescence, kindled and brought to life by the similarity between torchlight reflecting from a foxes eyes, and marsh-gas glow in old dead treestumps. The symbol is very old. Normally we take care when teaching this one because the 'prentice is likely to set fire to fur and friends, but not my lad Foxeris. No, he conjured what looked to be a perfectly harmless wisp of light, until it tried to suck the life out of our four-silver-string horses. It seems he had conjured a will-o-wisp, and of course there was I without any Wolfbane, not even Henbane. So I had to decoy it into attacking me, and work its siphon in reverse. Not fun on the best of days, and this was after a long ride down from the hills -- we didn't stop at the fortress where the Old Road began, we kept on for another two hours before we made camp at a Rangers base. There wasn't a Ranger around, of course. No such luck. I was hoping for someone special. After draining the thing dead, I couldn't sleep, too much excess energy, and so I spent the night grooming all the burrs and thistles off the horses and myself and Fox, who had been dragged through the burr-bushes beside the road when he tried to keep the horses from panicking. It was just as well that we didn't stay back and camp with the caravan, but then, I kind of expected _something_ was going to happen. Anyway. Today we made it half the remaining distance to Honor and Duty Farm, and I decided to find out just what talents my 'prentice does have. We already know he won't be a spell-singer -- his voice is pretty good but he stutters even when he's singing. First time I ever came across that particular handicap. He did OK with the little weather dance I taught him, except for tripping twice on a sharp shadow. Which means I better not teach him how to do more than tell what the weather will be. I remember when I was an apprentice, and I don't want to meet another tornado. He did show some promise with illusions, especially dreamwalking. That's not my personal greatest strength, but I know enough to get him started. * * * Just when you think life has giving you a pile of rocks, it starts to look like thoughs rocks have dimons, gold and silver in 'em. (Is that expressing my self enough boss?) Now I just need to get to it. The rocks are obviouces, getting hooked up with the boss, at first I though he was a pompuss fool. Know that I know better, I'm sure of it. In truth though, he's turned out to be ok, though at times has a short temper, like after I screwed up the FoxFire spell, he realy reamed me out for that one. Of course sometimes he dosn't listen to me, like with when he had me sing, I tryed to tell him I'm more of a base, but he insisted I do tennor. Other that things are going ok, the boss has informed me that have some abbility in illusions and dreamwalking, which explains why I have NEVER had a vist from a Nightmare. I finaly have gotten around to taking a look inside of the package that Xavier had given me to take to Alex (I alreeady looked at the note, but it was in a forien laguage). Inside was a small white square, I'd say three and a half inches on a side. On one end was a small pieac of meatal that wraped around it's thin width, it slide like a cover, under neithe it was a black disk. On the center of the underside was a small mettal ring, with a hole in the Center, and one to the side. In turned, but didn't appere to do anything. It's the one of the stranger things I have seen, the boss didn't know what to make of it either. Well tomorow we will be reaching the Honor and Duty farms, who are old firends of the boss. We plan to speend two days there, pick up some suplies, clean up, and move out. I can't wait to get there, then I'll be able to get all of this bloody ash out of my fur! * * * You're getting better, prentice. Still, I think I better provide you with a bit more help. Remember what I've been telling you about spelling really being important? Well, there's some old magic that I can pull together that'll help you for a while. I need to find the component, but we should be able to get it from my friends up the road. Oh yeah, one other thing. When I tell you to sing tenor, not bass, there's a reason for it. The spell I was showing you, changing the color of the campfire, uses the pitch of your voice to control the shade of the light. There's a correspondence between the frequency of the sound and the frequency of the light. If you sing bass, the whole thing becomes heat. It'd be worse, I suppose, if you had a really high-pitched voice; I knew a femWeasel who had an alto-soprano voice, and she could sing a fire into the ultraviolet. Now, get some sleep, we're going to make it to Honor Farms tomorrow and it's going to be a long ride. '95 May 10'th -- The Journal of Frinklan the Obscure -- Honor the Wolf has a child stuck in shapechoosing. His mate died in an accident last year. Clor is almost six, and she misses her mommie, and wants to be a Cat like her mother was, but that's not her nature. Honor has asked me to help Clor in her choosing. What he wants me to do isn't completely legal, but we're not in any city where the Law is going to come after me. Besides, this is important. I have Foxeris helping me. He can't really mess this up, all he has to do is stand there and be himself. The ritual calls for three people to stand witness while the mage calls out the spirit of the child and binds its form and nature. It's the ritual used by the humans who wanted to force their children to be human as well. I'm not using it the way they did, of course: Clor has her own most natural form, and this will remind her of the shape she started before her mother's death. -- 2 hours later -- We're halfway done. I've constructed the octacle and said the stricture and the uncoupling. The Book of the Zoo is in the pentacle with Clor. At sunset the spirits of the animals will appear. It took a lot more effort than I expected; I felt like something was fighting me, so I borrowed against a little good luck in the journey to make it succeed. Sure, it'll mean we might be a little slower, but that doesn't matter, if it lets a little girl live past her seventh birthday. -- morning -- It worked, but I think the luck already kicked back on me. I didn't expect Faith to show up. Sunset came the way it always does, and the shapes started appearing: Mouse, and Eagle, Snake, and Vole, Shrew, Rat, Muskrat, and Wolf, Crow, and Rabbit. Honor was a little disappointed when Wolf came and left. Bear came and went as well, then Lion, and Otter (who nodded to me, of course). Lynx came and left, then Wolverine, and then Cat. Cat was a surprise: she touched Clor and a cord of gold appeared. Clor's mother Faith appeared at the other end of the cord. Faith had chocolate-point siamese coloring; I noticed it looked good in ectoplasm. When Cat left, Faith was still there. Mink came, and waited. While the gold cord was still there he couldn't reach Clor to teach her the shaping. Duty, Clor's grandmother, put her bear-paw on my shoulder and asked me what to do. Well, this was a new one on me too. Nothing in the books about mothers whose daughters hold on to them after death. Still, it's the job of a Wizard to appear to know what he's doing. So, I stepped up to the Spirit World. I don't like seeing my body sit there without me in it. Besides, I attract strange things, and some of them WATCH me. This time nothing was waiting, so I walked along the octacle until I intersected with Faith. She seemed a little surprised being there. It took a minute or two for her to figure out how to talk -- it seems Clor was so worried that her mama would die, that she caught hold of her spirit before she died. Clor is going to be one sharp magician, when she grows up -- specialist in spirit magic, no doubt. It took both of us to talk her into letting her momma go. Well, once she let me cut the Cord, the Mink started talking to her again. I got back into my body, and we shut down the spell -- Clor was already starting to change, I could smell it. Except that when we got ready to go, Faith came with us. She says it's less boring than the farm. I think it's less frustrating, maybe. She doesn't want to stay around Honor, at least, not for a while. She says he needs to get over Faith being dead, find a new mate, and he won't do that while she's hanging around. I hope she doesn't scare the horses. Now, before I forget -- my fee for the spell. I have to ask a fee, it's tradition. Honor wondered why I wanted an old disc of red plastic with a crown embossed on one side and a star on the other. I just gave him my best fishy smile, and took the checker. Since it was payment for a spell, it was a straightforward incant-and-enchant through the horribleness of the pun to create a spell-checker. All Foxeris has to do is put it up at the top of the page while he's writing, and it'll turn red when he tries to write a word that he's spelling incorrectly, and it'll turn black when he's right. I suppose he's going to be asking me questions more often, but that's OK if he learns from it. * * * Its lunch time. We stopped and the boss says I should try his present. "spel worng" Hey, it works! I'll write what happened before we left. I was throwing the third bag of fruit, a gift from Honor and Duty, on to the pack horse, when I felt a brush on my shoulder. I turned around. Behind me I saw the light outline of a cat, I couldn't tell more. "Boss." I said, a bit nervous. "Yes, What is it?" "We have company." I said, my eyes still fixed on what had to be a ghost. "Oh, thats just Faith, she's coming with us." In a flash I turned around, and looked at him, "WHAT?!" "I said she's coming with us, is your hearing going bad as well?" I shook my head, "Why is a ghost coming with us?" Frinklan sighed and explained. I just shook my head, "So how long will she stay with us?" "As long as she wishes." I sighed, "Well at least she dosn't have to eat." The boss chuckled. *** Well, I can see that the spell checker has its limitations. Still, it's better than it was. Lunch didn't take too long. I'm kind of worried about Faith. I'm not sure what's normal for a ghost, but she doesn't seem quite right. I'm going to ask Foxeris to watch her. Meanwhile, by the end of the day tomorrow, we should get to the upper reaches of the Columby, and I know a trail down to the water that only takes a day. I'm not quite sure what we're going to do with the horses but something will come up. It always does. This story is posted to rec.arts.comics.creative, alt.fan.furry, alt.pub.dragons-inn, and spk.literary. It is copyrighted 1995 by Stephen Hutchison and Fox Cutter. Permission is granted for archive with rec.arts.comics.creative and alt.pub.dragons-inn, and spk.literary. All other rights, including repost, are reserved to the authors. This story may not be distributed for a fee except by permission of the authors, and this copyright notice may not be removed.