Kelder nodded.
“And some of the spells take hours to do, or even days,” Irith said. “And some of the ingredients are a real nuisance to get hold of, you know? So it’s just not very convenient, being a wizard. It’s not like theurgy, where you can just call on a god and ask for a favor, or warlockry, where I don’t know what they do but it seems to work right away without any spells or equipment or anything.”
“So...” Kelder prompted.
“So,” Irith said, “this wizard Javan, who was some kind of genius or something, started looking for ways to get rid of all the rituals and magic words and rare ingredients and things. He wanted to find some way to get right at that chaos or whatever it is without all the in-between stuff. And he figured that if the ingredients are just symbols for something in the underlying chaos, then why can’t we use symbols of symbols? The way we use words as symbols, maybe. And he found a way he could sort of do this, sort of. He found a way to put spells right into a wizard’s brain, or his soul, or somewhere. He still had to do the whole ritual and everything, but he didn’t have to do it all just when he wanted the spell to work, he could do it in advance, and sort of store the spell in his head, ready to go. I mean, he could take some petrifaction spell or something that would take two days to perform, and he would run through the whole two-day ritual, and then his own little spell with it, and that would put the whole thing in his head, and then he could carry it there as long as he wanted, and then when he saw the person he wanted to petrify, he could just point and say a word, and that whole big fancy two-day spell would come pouring out of his head and down his arm, and bang! The person would be turned to stone.” Irith paused. “I think witchcraft works sort of like that, too,” she said, “but I’m not sure.”
Kelder nodded; Asha looked slightly confused. “But then, if wizards can carry spells around like that, why...” she began.
Kelder hushed her. “Irith will explain.”
“Right,” Irith agreed, “I will. So, Javan came up with this, and he called it Javan’s Augmentation of Magical Memory, Javan’s First Augmentation of Magical Memory — because you carry the spells in your head like memories, you see? Anyway, it’s a pretty good spell, it’s hard to do but it’s useful, and it’s still around, but not all that many wizards know it, because it is hard to do, and besides, there are some problems with it.”
“Like what?” Asha asked.
“Like, you can only do maybe three spells with it, four if they’re simple ones, maybe only two if they’re big, complicated ones. You can store them away in your head — but while any of them are still in there, you can’t do any other magic. And sometimes they go bad while they’re stored, and they don’t work right when you try them. And each one is only good once — use it, and it’s gone. So if you did a petrifaction spell, and the person you want to use it on has a couple of friends with him with swords, you could be in big trouble, because it’ll only work once. Oh, and there’s no way to get the spells out without using them, so if you store up a curse, and then your victim dies before you use it, you need to find someone else to put the curse on, or it’ll stay in your head forever and you won’t be able to do any other magic at all until you get it out. So it’s not all that useful a spell.”
Asha nodded.
“So that’s the First Augmentation,” Kelder said. “What’s the second one?”
“I’m getting to that,” Irith said. “So Javan had this spell, but it wasn’t everything he wanted, right? I mean, you could only carry three spells and they didn’t always work right, and it was a hard spell to perform in the first place. So he tried to come up with an improvement on it.”
“The Second Augmentation,” Kelder suggested.
“That’s right,” Irith agreed. “Except it wasn’t exactly an improvement after all, it’s just different. It lets you carry about a dozen spells, if you do it right, and you can use each one over and over, as many times as you like — but they never come out. And you can’t learn any more magic, ever.”
Kelder blinked. He thought that over.
“And there isn’t any counter-spell, at least not that anyone’s ever found. Which is why there wasn’t any Third Augmentation — because Javan tried out the spell, and loaded a dozen spells into his head, or maybe a dozen anyway, and from then on he could use them all as easily as snapping his fingers, but he could never get them out, and he couldn’t do any other magic, ever, and no other wizardry would even work on him, he was so charged full of magic, and since he hadn’t used any youth spells or immortality spells or anything in his experiment, that was the end of him — he lived about another thirty years, I guess, and he could do those ten or twelve spells all he wanted, but he wasn’t any use for anything else.” She grimaced. “Anyway, he’d written the whole thing down, so anyone who wanted — I mean, any wizard who could work high-order magic, because it’s not an easy spell — anyway, anyone who wanted to could see how the spell was done, but nobody ever tried it again.” She took a deep breath.
“Except me,” she said.
Chapter Twenty-One
Irith had paused in her story, but Kelder and Asha just waited, and after a moment she began where she had left off.
“It was... well, I’d heard the story from Kalirin, about how the great Javan went and ruined himself, and I was worried about the war, and I didn’t want to be a wizard, and I was really sick and tired of being an apprentice — I mean, for three years I had worked the skin right off my fingers, doing all this weird stuff,” Irith said. “And it seemed like a good idea, to go ahead and do the spell, and then I’d know some magic, but I couldn’t go into combat because I wouldn’t know the right kind of magic, and I’d never be able to do research — I wouldn’t be able to do any other magic, ever. So I started picking out the spells, and practicing up. The book said that Javan’s Second Augmentation was a seventh-order spell, but it looked a lot easier than that, and I was doing fourth-order spells without much trouble, and I figured that if it didn’t work I wasn’t any worse off. I mean, usually, when a spell doesn’t work right, nothing happens at all. Sometimes it goes wrong, and all kinds of horrible things can happen when that happens, but usually it doesn’t, you see?”
Kelder nodded.
“So I started picking out the spells I wanted, and collecting all the ingredients for everything. I can still remember what I needed for the Augmentation — maybe one reason I liked the idea was that there wasn’t anything really yucky in it. I needed three left toes from a black rooster, and a plume from a peacock’s tail, and seven round white stones, six of them exactly the same weight and the seventh three times as much, and a block of this special incense that had been prepared in the morning mist of an open field, and then I needed my wizard’s dagger.” Irith smiled dreamily, leaning on one elbow. “You know, I haven’t thought about this stuff in ages! All that stuff, to work magic!”
“You don’t have a wizard’s dagger now, do you?” Asha asked.
“Of course not,” Irith said, sitting up again. “I had to break it as part of the spell. I cut my knee doing it, too.”
“Go on,” Kelder said.