"I cannot patch them, then," the cyclops said. "Great or little, your knowledge of magic far exceeds my own. Nay, in future I'll stick to my boulders. Good even, Lord Matthew." And he turned away to find himself a nice soft patch of grass.
Matt stared after him, frowning, feeling somehow guilty. He certainly hadn't meant to hurt their feelings, or to make them feel small. He was just being honest—but of course, admitting that he didn't really know what he was doing wasn't exactly going to inspire confidence in people who were depending on him. Besides, though he hadn't been studying magic his whole life, he had been studying the controls for it, without knowing it—literature. He had become a student, though somewhat reluctantly, in elementary school—and Miss Grind, in junior high, had practically killed his love for poetry by forcing his class to read syrupy sentiments by minor versifiers and telling her students they were great. But Mr. Luce and Miss Soleil, in high school, had restored his wonder at the old songs, and a couple of his college professors had helped him to understand the new ones: The rest, at least, he had suffered in silence; their subject matter redeemed their teaching. His whole advantage, against the sorcerers in Merovence, had come from his knowing great poetry that they hadn't known.
Well, no, not just from that. To be fair, a lot of his advantage had come from being able to analyze the workings of magic methodically—being able to ask, "How does that work?" and figure out an answer.
And how had he done his figuring? Well, by the scientific method, really—observation, formulation of hypothesis, experimentation, revision, and conclusion. And where had he learned that? From that wonderful ninth-grade science teacher, and from the other science courses he'd been forced to take in high school and college. No, in a manner of speaking, he'd have to say that he'd been studying the background material for Merovence's magic longer than he had known—which was why he'd been able to learn it so quickly here.
So apply it all again. He'd figured out how magic worked in Merovence with nothing but his own observations to help him. Later on, he'd refined that knowledge with a lot of helpful hints people had given him—but he'd figured out his first purposeful spell on his own.
If he could have done it then, he could do it now. Okay—apply the scientific method to a fantastic object. Figure out how the magic wand worked...
On the other side of the fire, Narlh eyed Matt warily. He could tell from the way the wizard was staring at the smooth stick that he wasn't going to be paying any attention to anything else all evening. Silently, and without Matthew noticing, Narlh uncurled and started prowling. So the wizard would take first watch? Big deal. So Narlh would watch the wizard—and anything else that came up.
His back being guarded without his knowing it, Matt studied the wand, trying to apply the scientific method to magic. After all, it was a method for solving problems, any problems that produced symptoms, which could show the way to a possible solution, which could in turn be checked by experiment.
Okay. First: observation.
Well, Matt had observed that the wand was used, and he had seen and felt the result when it was pointed at him—but the consequences weren't noticeably different from those of any other spells he'd experienced. Of course, they were presumably stronger than they would have been without the wand—but maybe it had just been amplifying the magic of a very weak sorcerer.
Amplifier? No, certainly a stick of wood couldn't function as an amplifier.
But the idea did catch at Matt's attention, at least enough to make an analogy between magic and electronics—and he moved into the next step of the scientific method: hypothesizing. After all, electromagnetism was a field force, and from what Matt felt when he worked a spell, so was magic. Here in Ibile, the feeling of some sort of force gathering all about him was almost suffocating. If the analogy held, the field force could be channeled into a directional force.
Was that what the wand did?
Yes, of course! It was the "antenna" for the "transmission" of magic—and a spell converted the field force into a form that could be "modulated," formed, by a human mind! That modulated force could be radiated in all directions, which was what Matt had been doing—"broadcasting" magical energy. But the wand made the transmission directional, like a parabolic dish concentrating electromagnetic microwaves into a beam. Or like those sharp points of static electricity he once saw in the college laboratory, in his one required lab science course. If that was right, then the wand certainly wouldn't have been useful for summoning a horde of insects, controlling the weather, or anything in which the magic needed to affect everything in sight, in all directions.
Was that why some magicians used gestures, "mystic passes"—for the more general spells? Maybe the sawing of the air did do some good, after all—Matt had imagined it was just sort of an aid to concentration, or a way of boosting self-belief in the magic-worker's own power. But words were symbols, and it was those symbols that modulated, manipulated, the magical field. As Matt had recently proved, just thinking the symbols was enough, if you concentrated on making things happen through them—but for most people, himself included, it was easier to concentrate when you spoke aloud, which was why he had paced his room muttering to himself when he studied for exams. And why, come to think of it, magicians could write books of spells without making natural cataclysms erupt while they were writing—by deliberately not speaking the verses aloud, they'd been choosing to have the spells be ineffective. He'd noticed himself that a poem would concentrate a magical field about him, but that it couldn't discharge unless he put some sort of imperative at the end of the verse. If his analogy to electronics held, the verse accumulated and modulated that field, as a power amplifier increased the strength of a signal and a transmitter modulated it—but the completed radio wave couldn't go anywhere if you didn't route it into the antenna. The imperative at the end of the verse was like pressing the "transmit" button on a CB transceiver. The imperative, the command, was a matter of willing the spell to effect its results.
But if Matt had been broadcasting spells like a spark-gap transmitter, no wonder every wizard and sorcerer within range had suddenly known there was a strange magician in his territory! They'd picked him up, loud and clear.
Which was probably why the Ibilian sorcerers used wands—so that they could keep the king from knowing what they were doing. Of course, it also made spells more powerful, by making them more directional—so as Matt used the wand, it would direct the discharge of magic into a much smaller area, and there wouldn't be any spillover for King Gordogrosso to pick up.
The wand could let Matt work magic without letting the king and his noblemen know Matt was there. Also, by concentrating a field into a beam, it should make the spells much more powerful. Of course, this would only work for a spell that was supposed to happen in a very small area. It wouldn't do any good for fighting a whole army, as Matt had once infected a whole host of besiegers with salmonella, or for anything else that was supposed to apply to everything in the vicinity—but most spells were directed at specific people or things, anyway. With the wand, Matt wouldn't have worried that pushing the rock off Narlh's tail might alert the local magical gendarmes.
If the wand worked as Matt was guessing.
Hypothesizing, rather—he wasn't guessing blind; he had some data to build on.
Okay. The hypothesis was complete—but it was based on an analogy that might not really fit the actual situation. If the two forces only seemed to be analogous, but weren't really so, then the hypothesis would be wrong.