Liviapolis-Morgon Mortirmir
Morgon Mortirmir had moved up in the world-far enough to be trusted with real research.
Unfortunately, he’d only exchanged one set of irritable magisters for another.
Still, life was better. He stroked his fashionable short beard, thinking of Tancreda Comnena, who still sometimes called him “plague.”
Who was no longer planning to become a nun. They had an understanding, although her side of the understanding seemed mostly to have an unlimited licence to tease him.
Then he realized with annoyance that he was rubbing his short, pointed beard with the ink-stained fingers of his writing hand.
“Son of a bitch,” he swore. He was tempted to drama-to hurl something-but his left hand was resting on a recently recovered thousand-year-old manuscript from somewhere east of Rhum and his right hand held an artifactualy-charged ivory pen, and he could spare neither.
He compromised by swearing. He was getting better at swearing. As long as he didn’t blaspheme, the Master Grammarian, who still directed his studies, turned a blind eye.
He looked at the manuscript again. It was very old-probably far older than it appeared. On the surface, it was yet another re-hash of Aristotle. An astute Etruscan collector had noted some capitals-carefully illuminated-in an older hand, and had taken a magnifying glass to it.
It had been scraped clean somewhere in the east, a thousand years ago. Long before the Wild’s hordes had swept across the Holy Land and destroyed every sign of man-back when Demetriopolis and Alexandria Fryggia were thriving cities and not horrifying necropoli where only the not-dead and the boldest or most desperate adventurer or scriptorium-collector dared go.
Morgon was determined that someday, when his powers were fully developed, he would assay Demetriopolis and Ptolemaica himself. The library had once been the world’s greatest. The Suda, a collection of what appeared to be librarian’s notes on the collection, even claimed to have had manuscripts-scrolls-from other spheres. Other spheres! His thoughts went off into a whirlwind of supposition, creation and destruction like an intellectual ouroboros.
But the reality of the manuscript under his elbow drew him back. Hidden under the ancient Aristotle was something far more wonderful. It was, in fact, an Archaic essay on farming. Embedded in it were six workings, none of which had been deciphered by the Grammarian. He’d handed the whole amazing relic to Morgon with the words “You’re a genius-see if you can do anything with this.”
Morgon had spent every hour of the last forty on one passage three paragraphs long.
He had every word of the Archaic deciphered.
He had all the traditional grammatical parts of a working-the opening, which was sometimes an invocation and sometimes an enhancement of memory; the orologicum, a modern term for the process by which any one working accessed the power available from ops and potentia; and the trigger, which had a variety of elegant names in Low Archaic and usually a single High Archaic word.
He had that.
He knew the purpose of the working, as well. Flavius Silva’s Low Archaic was not on order with some of the other recently rediscovered ancients, but his words were easy enough to read, and Morgon had gone a step further by asking Tancreda to translate the whole passage, as she was a far better linguist than he.
“For the remedy of bad water for stock. Being that too often the farmer must use what water there is, whether that water be cool, flowing, and clean, or whether the farmer face a long summer and dry, and needeth to have his animals take even that which is green and full of filth.”
Morgon could see it well enough.
And the trigger was Purgo.
So-a single word, usually very powerful. The underlying working was very complex. Complex, with a simple trigger-very powerful.
Yesterday, far more awake, Morgon had worked it, with Tancreda standing by (and her brother, too-Morean noblewomen did not spend time alone with male students for any reason) on a glass of hideous, dirty water, green with some sort of an algae bloom that was particulate in nature.
He mastered the working, powered it, and felt the ops inhabit the working and give it life.
And then-nothing. The water in the glass remained a lurid green, like an advertisement for the enmity of the Wild to the works of man.
He cast it three times, the third with Tancreda’s brother, an apprentice of the first year, barely able to summon a candle flame, measuring the working’s energy before and after ops.
Stefanos shrugged. “You cast a great deal of ops,” he said.
Morgon had shaken his head.
Now, a day later, and so tired that he could barely write out his notes, he had an idea. The idea was foolish, but Tancreda told him he was a fool all the time.
She was close behind him, insisting that he stop and take a meal.
He shook his head. “In a moment,” he said. He lifted the lurid glass of slime-and drank it.
Tancreda tried to dash it to the floor. “Oh, by the risen Christ, you will turn into something damned. At the least, you will never kiss me with that mouth again. Oh, my God. Stefanos, fetch a doctor-no, the Grammarian.”
As if summoned, the Master Grammarian appeared at the door. “What has happened?” he demanded.
Mortirmir shrugged. Were his guts churning? Did he imagine that?
“He drank the water,” Stefanos said. “Sir,” he added a little too late.
“Water?” the Master Grammarian asked, but he was not a master magister for nothing, and he picked up the clawed-foot glass and examined it. “Algae-a form of plant-did you know that?”
“I thought it might be an animiculus,” Mortirmir said.
“Why did you drink it?” demanded the Grammarian.
“I learned the working. It is supposed to purify water. Power goes in-quite a lot of power. But the water does not appear to change.” Mortirmir shrugged.
“You can purify water by boiling it,” the Grammarian noted.
Morgon stopped looking at his hands and thought. He looked at the Grammarian. “In which case, the water is purified, but the solids-mud, particulate matter, animaliculae-remain.”
The Grammarian nodded. “Yes.”
“And so with this working, but there is no warmth. I drank the water to ascertain the effect-whether it was, in fact, purified.” He shook his head. “It certainly tastes like raw bile.”
The Grammarian nodded. “Sensible, in an insane, over-tired way. Have me summoned if you fall sick.” He walked out through the door.
Tancreda shook her head. “You will be sicker than all the sick dogs,” she began.
Mortirmir shivered. But the process was on him-he ignored the lovely Despoina Comnena to pick up the magnifying glass he had used on the manuscript. Instead, he looked at the algae in the glass. Magnified, it was even more horrible.
But his idea bore no fruit. He looked and looked, but there were no malevolent darting shapes living in the weed-or the corpses thereof, which might have justified the expenditure of ops.
He was two hours into the creation of an enhancement working to create a lens of air when he realized that he knew nothing of lenses.
Tancreda rolled her eyes. “I will go to the library again,” she said. “Why not just ask a glass grinder?”
Morgon slapped his knee. “Brilliant!” he said, and was out the door with neither purse nor cloak.
In the emptiness of his absence, Tancreda turned to her noble brother. “You see why I love him,” she said.
He shrugged. “No. He’s quite mad.” He looked out into the street, where Morgon was running-long legs stretching as if in a sprint in the hippodrome.