The Book of Magic: A collection of stories by various authors

K.J. Parker

One of the most inventive and imaginative writers working in fantasy today, K. J. Parker is the author of the bestselling Engineer trilogy (Devices and Desires, Evil for Evil, The Escapement) as well as the previous Fencer (Colours in the Steel, The Belly of the Bow, The Proof House) and Scavenger (Shadow, Pattern, Memory) trilogies. His short fiction has been collected in Academic Exercises and The Father of Lies, and he has twice won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novella, for “Let Maps to Others” and “A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong.” His other novels include Sharps, The Company, The Folding Knife, and The Hammer. His most recent novels are Savages and The Two of Swords. K. J. Parker also writes under his real name, Tom Holt. As Holt, he has published Expecting Someone Taller, Who’s Afraid of Beowulf, Ye Gods!, and many other novels.

In the sly story that follows, he takes us to the Studium, an elite academy for wizards, and shows us that a competition for an important position among three highly powerful sorcerers can soon become dark, devious, and dangerous—and quite likely deadly as well.

The Return of the Pig

[NOSTALGIA; from the Greek, νοστουάλγεα, the pain of returning home]

It was one of those mechanical traps they use for bears and other dangerous pests—flattering, in a way, since I’m not what you’d call physically imposing. It caught me slightly off square, crunching my heel and ankle until the steel teeth met inside me. My mind went white with pain, and for the first time in my life I couldn’t think.

Smart move on his part. When I’ve got my wits about me, I’m afraid of nothing on Earth, with good reason; nothing on Earth can hurt me, because I’m stronger, though you wouldn’t think it to look at me. But pain clouds the mind, interrupts the concentration. When it hurts so much that you can’t think, trying to do anything is like bailing water with a sieve. It all just slips through and runs away, like kneading smoke.

Ah well. We all make enemies. However meek and mild we try to be, sooner or later, we all—excuse the pun—put our foot in it, and then anger and resentment cloud the judgment, and we do things and have things done to us that make no logical sense. An eloquent indictment of the folly of ambition; one supremely learned and clever intellectual does for another by snapping him in a gadget designed to trap bears. You’d take the broad view and laugh, if it didn’t hurt so very, very much.

What is strength? Excuse me if this sounds like an exam question. But seriously, what is it? I would define it as the quality that enables one to do work and exert influence. The stronger you are, the more you can do, the bigger and more intransigent the objects you can influence. My father could lift a three-hundredweight anvil. So, of course, can I, but in a very different way. So: here comes the paradox. I couldn’t follow my father’s trade because I was and still am a weakling. So instead I was sent away to school, where what little muscle I had soon atrophied into fat, and where I became incomparably strong. The hell with anvils. I can lift mountains. There is no mountain so heavy that I can’t lift it. Not bad going, for a man who has to call the porter to take the lids off jars.

The mistake we all make is to confuse strength with security. You think: because I’m so very strong, I need fear nothing. They actually tell you that, in fourth year: once you’ve completed this part of the course you should never be afraid of anything ever again, because nothing will have the power to hurt you. It sounds marvelous, and you write home: dear Mother and Father, this term we’ll be doing absolute strength, so when I see you next I’ll be invincible and invulnerable, just fancy, your loving son, etc. We believe it, because it’s so very plausible. Then you get field assignments and practicals, where you levitate heavy objects and battle with demons and divert the course of rivers and turn back the tides of the sea—heady stuff for a nineteen-year-old—and at the end of it you believe. I’m a graduate of the Studium, armed with strictoense and protected by lorica; I shall fear no evil. And then they pack you off to your first posting, and you start the slow, humiliating business of learning something useful, the hard way.

They mention pain, in passing. Pain, they tell you, is one of the things that can screw up your concentration, so avoid it if you can. You nod sagely and jot it down in your lecture notes: avoid pain. But it never comes up in the exam, so you forget about it.

All my life I’ve tried to avoid pain, with indifferent success.

My head was still spinning when the murderers came along. I call them that for convenience, the way you do. When you know what a man does for a living, you look at him and see the trade, not the human being. You there, blacksmith, shoe my horse; tapster, fetch me a pint of beer. And you see me and you fall on your knees and ask my blessing, in the hope I won’t turn you into a frog.

Actually they were just two typical Mesoge farmhands—thin, spare, and strong, with big hands, frayed cuffs, and good, strong teeth uncorrupted by sugar. One of them had a mattock (where I come from, they call them biscays), the other a lump of rock pulled out of the bank. One good thing about the murderer’s trade—no great outlay on specialist equipment.

They looked at me dispassionately, sizing up the extent to which pain had rendered me harmless. My guess is, they hadn’t been told what I was, my trade, though the scholar’s gown should have put them on notice. They figured I’d be no bother, but they separated anyway, to come at me from two directions. They hadn’t brought a cart, so I imagine their orders were to sling me in a ditch when they were all done. One of them was chewing on something, probably bacon rind.

The thing about strictoense—it’s actually a very simple Form. They could easily teach it in first year, except you wouldn’t trust a sixteen-year-old freshman with it, any more than you’d leave him alone with a jar of brandy and your daughter. All you do is concentrate very hard, imagine what you’d like to happen, and say the little jingle: strictoenseruit in hostem. Personally, I always imagine a man who’s just been kicked by a carthorse, for the simple reason that I saw it happen to my elder brother when I was six. One moment he was going about his business, lifting the offside rear hoof to trim it with his knife. His concentration must have wandered because, quick as a thought, the horse slipped his hold and hit him. I saw him in the split second before he fell, with a sort of semicircular dent a fingernail deep directly above his eyebrows. His eyes were wide open—surprise, nothing more—and then he fell backward and blood started to ooze and his face never moved again. It’s useful when you have a nice, sharp memory to draw on.

If they’d come along a minute earlier, I’d have been in no fit state. But a minute was long enough, and strictoense is such an easy Form, and I’ve done it so often; and that particular memory is so very clear, and always with me, near at hand, like a dagger under your pillow. I tore myself away from the pain just long enough to speculate what those two would look like with hoofprints on their foreheads. Then I heard the smack—actually, it’s duller, like trying to split endgrain, when the axe just sinks in, thud, rather than cleaving, crack—and I left them to it and gave my full attention to the pain, for a very long time.

Two days earlier, we all sat down in austerely beautiful, freezing cold Chapter to discuss the chair of Perfect Logic, vacant since the untimely death of Father Vitruvius. He’d been very much old school—a man genuinely devoted to contemplation, so abstract and theoretical that his body was always an embarrassment, like the poor relation that gets dragged along on family visits. Rumor had it that he wasn’t always quite so detached; he’d had a mistress in the suburbs and fathered two sons, now established in a thriving ropewalk in Choris and doing very well. Most rumors in our tiny world are true, but not, I think, that one.

There were three obvious candidates; the other two were Father Sulpicius and Father Gnatho. To be fair, there was not a hair’s weight between the three of us. We’d known one another since second year (Gnatho and I were a year above Sulpicius; I’ve known Gnatho even longer than that), graduated together, chose the same specialities, were reunited after our first postings, saw one another at table and in the libraries nearly every day for twenty years. As far as ability went, we were different but equal. All three of us were and had always been exceptionally bright and diligent; all three of us could do the job standing on our heads. The chair carries tenure for life, and all three of us were equally ambitious. For the two who didn’t get it, there was no other likely preferment, and for the rest of our lives we’d be subordinate by one degree to the fortunate third, who’d be able to order us about and send us on dangerous assignments and postings to remote and barbarous places, at whim.

I don’t actually hate Sulpicius, or even Gnatho. By one set of perfectly valid criteria, they’re my oldest and closest friends, nearer to me than brothers ever could be. If there’d been a remotely credible compromise candidate, we’d all three have backed him to the hilt. But there wasn’t, not unless we hired in from another House (which the Studium never does, for sheer arrogant pride); one of us it would have to be. You can see the difficulty.

The session lasted nine hours and then we took a vote. I voted for Gnatho. Sulpicius voted for me. Gnatho voted for Sulpicius. In the event, it was a deadlock, nine votes each. Father Prior did the only thing he could: adjourned for thirty days, during which time all three candidates were sent away on field missions, to stop them canvassing. It was the only thing Prior Sighvat could have done; it was also the worst thing he could possibly do. For all our strength, you see, we’re only human.

So there I was, a very strong human with a bear trap biting into my foot.

I’ve always been bad with pain. Before I mastered sicut in terra, even a mild toothache made me scream out loud. It used to make my poor father furiously angry to hear me sniveling and whimpering, as he put it, like a big girl. I was always a disappointment to him, even when I showed him I could turn lead pipe into gold. So the bear trap had me beat, I have to confess. All I had to do was prise it open with qualisartifex and heal the wound with vergens in defectum, fifteen seconds’ work, but I couldn’t, not for a very long time, during which I pissed myself twice, which was disgusting. Actually, that was probably what saved me. Self-disgust concentrates the mind the way fear is supposed to but doesn’t. Also, after something like five hours, judged by the movement of the sun, the pain wore off a little, or I got used to it.

That first stupendous effort—grabbing the wisp of smoke and not letting go—and then fifteen seconds of total dedication, and then, there I was, wondering what the hell all that fuss had been about. I stood up—pins and needles in my other foot made me wince, but I charmed it away without a second’s thought—and considered my shoe, which was irretrievably ruined. So I hardened the sole of my foot with scelussceleris and went barefoot. No big deal.

(Query: why is there no known Form for fixing trivial everyday objects? Answer, I guess: we live such comfortable, over-provided-for lives that nobody’s ever felt the need. Remind me to do something about it, when I have five minutes.)

All this time, of course, it had never once occurred to me to wonder why, or who. Naturally. What need is there of speculation when you already know the answer?

My mother didn’t raise me to be no watch officer; nevertheless, that’s what I’ve become, over the years, for the not-very-good reason that I’m very good at it. A caution to those aspiring to join the Order: think very carefully before showing proficiency for anything; you just don’t know what it’ll lead to. When I was young and newly graduated, my first field assignment was identifying and neutralizing renegades—witchfinding, as we call it and you mustn’t, because it’s not respectful. I thought: if I do this job really well, I’ll acquire kudos and make a name for myself. Indeed. I made a name for myself as someone who could safely be entrusted with a singularly rotten job that nobody wants to do. And I’ve been doing it ever since, the go-to man whenever there’s an untrained natural on the loose.

(Gnatho is every bit as good at it as I am, but he’s smart. He deliberately screwed up, to the point where senior men had to be sent out to rescue him and clear up the mess. It had no long-term effect on his career, and he’s never had to do it since. Sulpicius couldn’t trace an untrained natural if they were in the same bath together, so in his case the problem never arose.)

No witchfinding job is ever pleasant, and this one … I’d spent five hours in exquisite pain on the open moor, and I hadn’t even got there yet.

I tried to make up time by walking faster, but I’m useless at hills, and the Mesoge is crawling with the horrible things, so it was dark as a bag by the time I got to Riens. I knew the way, of course. Riens is six miles from where I grew up.

Nobody who leaves the Mesoge and makes good in the big city ever goes back. You hear rich, successful merchants waxing eloquent at formal dinners about the beauties of the Old Country—the waterfalls of Scheria, the wide-open sky of the Bohec, watching the sun go down on Beloisa Bay—but the Mesoge men sit quiet and hope their flattened vowels don’t give them away. I hadn’t been back for fifteen years. Everywhere else changes in that sort of time span. Not the Mesoge. Still the same crumbling dry-stone walls, dilapidated farmhouses, thistle- and briar-spoiled scrubland pasture, rutted roads, muddy verges, gray skies, thin, scabby livestock, and miserable people. A man is the product of the landscape he was born in, so they say, and I’m horribly aware that this is true. Trying to counteract the aspects of the Mesoge that are part and parcel of my very being has made me what I am, so I’m not ungrateful for my origins; they’ve made me hardworking, clean-living, honest, patient, tolerant, the polar opposite, the substance of which the Mesoge is the shadow. I just don’t like going back there, that’s all.

I remembered Riens as a typical Mesoge town: perched on a hilltop, so you have to struggle a mile uphill with every drop of water you use, which means everybody smells; thick red sandstone town walls, and a town gate that rotted away fifty years ago and which nobody can be bothered to replace; one long street, with the inn and the meetinghouse on opposite sides in the middle. Mesoge men have lived for generations by stealing one another’s sheep. Forty makes you an old man, and what my father mostly did was make arrowheads. Mesoge women are short and stocky, and you never see a pretty face; they’ve all gone east, to work in the entertainment sector. Those that remain are muscular, hardworking, forceful, and short-tempered, like my mother.

The woman at the inn was like that. “Who the hell are you?” she said.

I explained that I was a traveler; I needed a bed for the night, and if at all possible, something to eat and maybe even a pint of beer, if that wouldn’t put anybody out. She scowled at me and told me I could have the loft, for six groschen.

The loft in the Mesoge is where you store hay for the horses. The food is stockfish porridge—we’re a hundred miles from the sea, but we live on dried fish, go figure—with, if you’re unlucky, a mountain of fermented cabbage. The beer—

I peered into it. “Is this stuff safe to drink?”

She gave me a look. “We drink it.”

“I think I’ll pass, thanks.”

There was a mattress in the loft. It can’t have been more than thirty years old. I lay awake listening to the horses below, noisily digesting and stamping their feet. Home, I said to myself. What joy.