The Book of Magic: Part 1. Группа авторов

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.

      The object of my weary expedition was a boy, fifteen years old, the tanner’s third son; it was like looking into a mirror, except he was skinny and at his age I was a little tub of lard. But I saw the same defensive aggression in his sneaky little eyes, fear mixed with guilt, spiced with consciousness of a yet-unfathomed superiority—he knew he was better than everybody else around him, but he wasn’t sure why, or how it worked, or whether it would stunt his growth or make him go blind. That’s the thing; you daren’t ask anybody. No wonder so many of them—of us—go to the bad.

      I said I’d see him alone, just the two of us. His father had a stone shed, where they kept the oak bark (rolled up like carpets, tied with string and stacked against the wall).

      “Sit down,” I told him. He squatted cross-legged on the floor. “You don’t have