The spellbook ofHigh Magic

The Council of Kings met beneath the Pyramid Temple of Poseidon, and the envoy from Azae had just proposed something no one from Azae would ever propose: handing half its warships to Gadirea. The wizard Straton, standing behind the Poseidonean throne, narrowed his eyes at the envoy and whispered a single word. The answer came to him as clearly as if it were written on the man's forehead: a charm, freshly laid, the work of someone who wanted Gadirea strong. Straton bent to his king's ear. The envoy went on talking, smiling vacantly.

The ogre had followed the wizard Ilias into the counting-house of a Mnesean iron mine, and he got the door shut just in time. He spoke a word against the planks. The ogre hit the door with its shoulder, then with both fists, then with a timber prop, and the door did not shift so much as a hair in its frame. But it was only an old pine door, and after a while the ogre stopped trying to push it open and started simply smashing through it. Ilias went looking for a window.

The apprentice wizards of Dardanus crowded the gallery as Selene, in her final year, knelt inside her chalked circle and faced the triangle she had drawn beside it. She had spent an hour on the two of them, checking every line. Now she spoke the evocation. For a minute nothing happened. Then a puff of sulphur, and in the triangle crouched an imp the size of a cat, leathery wings folded, glaring at her with yellow eyes. It spat. It tested the triangle's edge with one claw. Then, sullenly, it bowed its head to her and asked what she wanted.

The Meluhhan warehouse had been locked for the night, but the wizard Rohan needed to see what was inside the shipment from Acheron. He stood in the lane outside, well back from the watchman's lantern, pointed at the heavy wooden bar across the loading door and spoke one sharp word of command. The bar slid out of its brackets and clattered on the ground. The watchman spun around, stared at it, stared at the empty lane, and scratched his head. By the time he had put the bar back, Rohan was inside.

Nikias, an astrologer at the Observatory at Klymeus, had spent eleven years on his star charts, and he did not intend to lose them to a rival. He painted his personal sigil, a crescent crossed by three stars, on the lid of the cedar chest where they were kept. That night a hired thief crept into the observatory and put his hand on the lid. There was a crack and a blue flash, and the thief was flung across the room, his fingers smoking. Nikias, arriving in his nightshirt, opened the chest without a spark.

A rival had evoked a jinn to wreck the wizard Samira's tower above Kuru, and it was halfway through the roof when she came running up the stairs. She did not try to fight it. She pointed at the thing, a towering figure of smoke and flame, and spoke the words of constraint. It fought her; she felt it strain against the spell like a bull against a rope. Then something snapped. The jinn let out a great sigh of relief, bowed to her with genuine gratitude, and vanished back to wherever it had come from.

In the great hall of Avalon, the enemy's herald had begun to read out a declaration of war before the entire court. The wizard Merrick lifted two fingers and spoke. The herald's voice stopped. His mouth went on moving, working, straining, but not a sound came out, and his face turned from pale to red to purple. The court began to titter. Merrick lowered his hand and bowed to the throne. They would have perhaps five minutes, he murmured, in which to decide what to do about this war before the herald could finish reading.

The rock troll came out of the side tunnel below Ironhold with a club of raw stone, and the dwarven sentries fell back behind their human ally. The wizard Aldous raised his hand, pointed and spoke a single word of power in a voice like a slammed door. Fire leapt from nothing and struck the troll full in the chest. It had twisted aside at the last instant and caught only part of the blast, but its hide smoked and blistered and it bellowed in fury. Aldous spoke again. This time, it did not twist aside.

The Society of Magical Arts and Sciences in Tang admitted only Khitans, and the Atlantean wizard Cassia badly wanted a look at its library. So she spoke the spell before the mirror in her inn room and watched her face change. Her nose narrowed, her eyes changed shape, her hair darkened to black and her build thickened, until a stranger stared back at her, an ordinary Khitan scholar in middle age. Only her race stayed the same, and that was human enough. Nobody looked twice. She spent the whole afternoon among the scrolls.

The Sheban nobleman's bodyguard had been charmed, and everybody knew it: the man's eyes had that glassy, devoted look, and he never left his master's side. The wizard Kaveh, who had come to arrest the nobleman, did not argue with the bodyguard. He met the man's eyes, spoke the countermand under his breath and fought for him against the noble's own magic, until he felt the other caster's grip give way. The bodyguard blinked, and the devotion in his eyes turned toward Kaveh instead. Then, at Kaveh's nod, he took his old master by the arm.

The landlady of The Silver Pentacle came in with the wine just as the wizard Hesper was turning the pages of the stolen grimoire, and her eyes went straight to its black binding. Hesper closed it, smiled, and spoke one quiet word of command. The landlady's face went blank for a moment. She set down the wine, looked around the room as though she had forgotten why she came in, and then remembered: the wine, of course. She poured him a cup, chatted about the weather, and never remembered the grimoire.

The First Age inscription in the vaults of the Atlantis Historical Society had defeated three scholars already. The wizard Andros did not simply sit down and start. He lit incense, washed his hands, laid out his pens in a particular order, and chanted under his breath for ten minutes while the curator tapped his foot. Then he began to translate. His mind felt keen and steady, the odd glyphs a little easier to tease apart than they had any right to be. By evening he had most of the text, and the curator had stopped tapping his foot.

Twenty sentries and twenty archers guarded the Bridge Tower Gate on the Middle Ring of Atlantis, and the wizard Phaidon only needed to get past the six on the bridge itself. He walked up to them at midnight and spoke one soft word. Five of them sagged against the parapet, then slid down it, snoring. The sixth yawned hugely, shook his head, and reached for the bell rope. Phaidon had not expected that. He hit the man with his staff, then stepped over the five sleepers, who would not stir for an hour.

On the volcanic slopes of Yalak, the goatherd's son had cut his hand open on an obsidian flake. His mother carried him to the old wizard in the hut above the village, whose people had been led to this peninsula, long ago, by the First Sages of Atlantis. The old man took the boy's small hand in his wrinkled ones, spoke one word, low and resonant, and the gash sealed shut before the boy's eyes. It left a thin pink line, nothing more. The boy stopped crying, stared at it, and asked whether he could learn to do that.

Before she left Findias for a year of study in Khitai, the wizard Irene laid a ward on the door of her tower: an invisible knot of magic that would tell her, wherever she was, if anyone touched it. Eight months later, in an inn in Tang, she sat bolt upright in the middle of the night. Someone had just touched her door, half a world away. She did not know who. The ward told her nothing more, and it was gone now, spent. She lay awake until dawn, wondering.

The Netherman mercenary had been captured spying outside Chu Tang, and he spat on the floor when the wizard Kang came into the cell. Kang put his question in the man's own tongue, demanding the name of whoever had hired him. The command settled on him like a weight. He strained against it, face twisted, and then answered that he had been hired by a Sheban merchant. Kang smiled. The prisoner had fought off the command and lied, and the wizard knew it as surely as if the lie were printed on his face. There would have to be other methods.

The manticore came down on the wizard out of the Daraka rocks, lashing its tail and sending a storm of spikes at him. Sabah had already spoken the word. The spikes struck him and hurt, some of them badly, but a shimmer of force around him swallowed half of every blow. When the beast pounced, its claws tore through his cloak and into his arm, and still the wound was only half of what it should have been. He staggered, kept his feet, and began to chant the next spell. He had only a few minutes of protection left.

Her son had been snatched from the docks of Cardigiawn three days ago, and the wizard Olwen had not slept since. She knelt before the rain barrel in her yard and stared into the water, speaking his name. The surface stilled. For one minute she saw him: asleep in a ship's hold, among barrels, rocking. Southeast, she knew, a long way, perhaps two hundred miles. Open sea all around. Then the water trembled and the picture was gone. She stood up, soaked to the elbows, and went down to the harbor to hire a ship.

The wizard Kallisto's rival had sworn she would never reach the sunken coffer in Tartessos harbor, and when she dived for it, he flung a command after her from the quay: Stop. It slid off her like water off a seal. She kept swimming, down through the green gloom, moving through the harbor water as freely as she walked on land, and hauled the coffer out of the mud with both hands. When she surfaced, her rival was still standing on the quay, open-mouthed. She threw a handful of harbor mud at him.

The Amazon guards at the gate of Chersonopolis were famous throughout Hesperia for being incorruptible, and the wizard Stavros, as a man, had no business there at all. He walked up to them anyway, surrounded by his spell. The guard captain frowned at him. Then her frown turned to a curious, crooked smile, and she held out her hand for his bribe, and so did her sergeant, and the three spearwomen behind them. They waved him through. Once he was out of sight, they looked at the gold in their palms in horror.

The executioner raised his axe over the bowed neck of the condemned man in the Public Square of Acheron. From the back of the crowd, the wizard Menna shouted one word of command: Stop. The executioner froze in mid-swing, the axe hovering above his head. He could lower it, turn around, shout, run; he could do anything else he liked. But he could not bring that blade down, not for a long while yet. The high priest of Heru rose from his chair, furious, and the crowd began to push toward the scaffold.

The Naga priestess was beautiful and soft-spoken, and her hood swayed gently as she welcomed the envoy into her court in the depths of the Yallock. The wizard Talos, who had come as the envoy's protector, had already spoken the word of guard under his breath. When the priestess looked deep into his eyes and whispered, he felt the magic slide off his mind like rain off a roof. He smiled back politely. The envoy beside him, unguarded, had already begun to nod along with everything she said. Talos began to count the minutes.

The East and West Markets of Tang are crowded at noon, and anyone could be watching. The wizard Juno had learned that the hard way, so before she stepped out among the spice stalls she spoke the word and wrapped herself in awareness. Halfway down the row of alchemists' shops she felt it: a prickle between her shoulder blades, as clear as a finger pressed there. She did not turn. She knew exactly where it came from, the upper balcony of the teahouse on her left. She bought a bag of ginger and strolled on, planning.

The Fomorian longhouse was full of sleeping giants, snoring like surf, and the slave pen was at the far end. The wizard Branoc spoke his last word for a while and drew the silence around him. Then he walked the length of the hall. His boots made no sound on the rushes; his sword did not clink; even his breathing was gone. Once a giant stirred and opened one eye, stared straight through the gloom at nothing, and went back to sleep. At the pen, Branoc signaled to the captives with his hands. He could not speak a word.

The tax collector from the Joktan governor's office had been following the wizard Hazael around the market for an hour, waving a scroll and demanding arrears on a house Hazael had sold two years ago. At last Hazael turned, pointed and spoke a single word of command. The collector's mouth snapped shut. He turned on his heel and walked briskly off through the crowd, around the corner, and out of sight, without once looking back. He would not be able to come near Hazael again for an hour. It was the most peaceful hour of the wizard's week.

On one of the empty Isles of Zora, the hermit wizard Asenath had spent a full hour inscribing her circle and triangle on the floor of a ruined shrine, burning a costly offering of myrrh and saffron. Now she spoke the evocation. The air in the triangle thickened and turned red, and within minutes it held a lesser demon, a hunched, goat-faced brute with a butcher's grin. It snarled, lunged and struck the edge of the triangle as though it were a wall. Asenath waited. It tried twice more. Then it knelt.

The Vanir champion would face a Cimmerian warlock at dawn, in single combat, and he knew nothing about magic except that he hated it. The cabalist traveling with his clan laid her hand on his broad chest and spoke. He felt nothing. But when the duel began, and the warlock flung a spell of binding frost at him, it seemed to hesitate in the air, then splintered and fell away harmlessly. The champion did not understand what had happened. He did not stop to think about it. He simply charged.

Five Scythian riders came down the narrow gully at the wizard Arkas, bows drawn, horses at a gallop, and they were almost on top of him when he spoke the word. The gully went still. Four horses and their riders stood locked in place like bronze statues, bows half drawn, mouths open on silent war cries. The fifth rider and his mount shook off the spell together and kept on coming. Arkas drew his sword. He had a few minutes before the other four could move again.

At the harvest festival in Channu-Daro, a gang of thieves worked the crowd, and the wizard Anjali had watched them lift three purses. When they drew knives on her in a quiet corner behind the dancers, she spoke the word, and the sphere spread out around her like ripples in a pond. The four thieves stopped, turned around, and began to wander off in different directions, one into a sweetmeat stall, another in circles. The fifth, a sharp-eyed girl, stared at her friends in dismay and fled. The others would be muddled for ten minutes.

No one knows who built the Pyramid of the Atlantydes, and no one has ever found its door. The wizard Phaedra stood before its sheer flank, spoke the word and watched the stone part before her like a curtain: a rectangular opening, taller than a man, running straight back into the dark. She lifted her lamp and stepped inside. Ten feet in, the passage ended in a smooth wall of the same pale stone, just as solid as the outside. She stared at it. The pyramid, it seemed, was very, very thick.

The Tharshi slave-trader had sold the wizard's sister to a mine, and Hamilcar had followed him across half of Tharshesh to the docks of Tartessos. He stepped out of the crowd, pointed a finger and spoke a curse of transformation. The trader's face lengthened, his ears grew long, his back bent and gray hair sprouted over his fine silks. A moment later there was a goat standing on the quay, bleating furiously in a pile of clothes. The crowd roared with laughter. Hamilcar picked up the halter from a nearby pen and led the goat away.

The wizard Evander kept his most dangerous book in a lacquered case in his house in Goldar, and on its lid he spent an hour painting a spell in magical inks, in long and elegant script. One day a burglar broke into the study, found the case and, unable to read, bent low to puzzle out the beautiful lettering anyway. He studied it for a moment, trying to make it out. Then his eyes closed, and he toppled sideways onto the rug, sound asleep. Evander, home within the hour, found him snoring peacefully beside the case.

The Fomorian captain towered over the wizard on the deck of his slave ship, grinning through his beard. The wizard Brigid spoke to him in the giant's own coarse tongue, one command in a voice like cracking ice: Open the hold. The captain's grin faltered. He turned, walked stiffly to the hatch, and heaved it open with his own hands, and the daylight poured down on the chained captives below. He could not have been made to throw himself overboard. But opening a hatch was a simple enough task, and the magic made him do it.

The Leopard Men burst out of the jungle around the wizard Kojo with claws strapped to their hands and masks over their faces, six of them, snarling. He spoke the word. It struck the air like a thunderclap without sound, and five of the killers dropped where they stood, reeling, eyes rolling, unable to lift their claws. The sixth shook his head, staggered, and came on. Kojo met him with his staff. He had only a few minutes before the others shook off the stunning blow, and he meant to be gone by then.

The new envoy from Sheba was charming, beautiful and dressed in the finest silks of Bersheba, and the wizard Ptolemy did not trust her at all. He spoke the word as she bowed before the King of Ophir in Khaffir, and looked at her again. What he saw was not what everyone else saw. She was no woman of Sheba. She was a Naga, cold-blooded and scaled beneath her disguise, of great power and deep evil. He looked away quickly, before she could see his face change, and went looking for the captain of the guard.

The Ska pirates swarmed over the rail of the Ku fishing boat, axes raised, and the wizard who had booked passage home that morning stood up from among the nets. He spoke the word. Terror swept across the deck like a wave. The pirates dropped their axes, screaming, and fled in every direction; three leapt straight over the side into the icy water rather than stay near him, and one ran up the mast and jumped from the top. Only their captain stood his ground, white-faced, on the deck of his own ship. He did not come any closer.

The Grey Council met in a cellar under a wine shop in Tartessos, around a single oil lamp. Before anyone spoke, the wizard Isidore cast the sphere over the table, and for the next hour no scrying mirror in the world could have found them. Across the city, a Tharshi magistrate's sorcerer bent over his bowl of water and whispered their names, and saw nothing at all but his own frowning reflection. He tried again, and again, with every spell he knew. Beneath the wine shop, the council talked on undisturbed.

The assassin had been caught with a knife in the wizard's bedroom, and the wizard Sofia did not want the bother of a trial. She stood within arm's length of him and spoke the word. He fought it, face twisted, and lost. In a blink he was gone, dagger and boots and all, and he reappeared inside a locked cell at one of the military stations of Atlantis, a cell Sofia knew well from a regrettable night in her student days. The sergeant on duty found him the next morning.

The necromancer rose from his table at the back of The Black Skull and pointed a bony finger at the wizard Ramses, spitting a curse of withering. It struck the air around Ramses, rang like a struck bell, and rebounded. The necromancer shrieked as his own curse took him, his hand shriveling to a claw. Snarling, he pulled a black wand from his sleeve and flung a bolt of fire. This time the aura did nothing at all; spells from wands are not turned. Ramses dived behind the bar, smoking, and swore.

The thief had stolen a small orichalc idol from the Atlantis Historical Society and sold it to a Makara trader from the sunken city of Attla. The wizard Kleio had him dragged before her, and she told him, clearly, slowly, in plain Atlantean, exactly what he would do: go to Attla, find the idol, and bring it back. The thief laughed and said no. By the third day, the fever had set in. By the fifth, he could not stand. On the sixth day, barely able to lift his head, he begged for a boat. The geas would not let go of him until the idol was home.

In the Wilderness of Zin, on a night without a moon, the wizard Azariel stood inside his circle while a greater devil took shape in the triangle before him. It towered over him, bronze-skinned and horned, flames licking at its feet, and looked down at him with an expression of vast contempt. It spoke his name, softly, and he felt its will push against the circle. He held firm and spoke the evocation again. It resisted him once, twice. On the third time, it bowed its great horned head. It would serve.

The Kazak horsemen had ridden down from the Himvati plateau and surrounded the wizard Tenzin, lances lowered, laughing, pressing in close to finish him. He spoke the word. The riders nearest him cried out and clutched at their faces; their eyes had gone white and sightless. Horses reared and collided. Two of the Kazaks still blinked and saw, shouting to their comrades in confusion. Tenzin walked away between the blind men, leading his pony, while his remaining foes shouted after him. Their friends would see again, in a few minutes.

The bandits who haunted the First Age ruins on Ogylus had caught the wizard Nikandros, and now they stood around him in a ring, knives drawn, enjoying themselves. He smiled at them and said, calmly, that they were all mice. There was a pause. Then, one after another, the bandits dropped their knives, went down on all fours and scurried squeaking into the cracks between the stones, trembling and sniffing. One remained upright, gaping at his friends. Nikandros hit him with a rock. The others would be mice for an hour.

At the State Astrological Observatory in Tang, the astrologer Master Lu spent a full day at his workbench inscribing a spell of sleep on a disk of copper no larger than a coin. His apprentices brought him tea and were sent away. At sunset the talisman glowed once and went dark, charged. Months later, on the road to Chu Tang, bandits surrounded his litter. Master Lu held up the talisman and spoke one word. Four of the five bandits dropped in a snoring heap, and the fifth fled. That evening at the inn, it took him an hour to recharge it.

The Sheban corsair galley was bearing down on the little Atlantean merchant ship, its bronze-shod ram gleaming in the sun. The wizard Callias, standing in the bows, pointed at the galley's prow and spoke. The ram, the stempost and a good piece of the forward hull crumbled into dust and blew away on the wind. The galley's bow dipped, took water and slewed sideways, oars tangling, crew shouting. The merchant ship sailed past, close enough to see the corsair captain's face. Callias waved to him.

The wizard Cyril was three weeks into a voyage to Khitai when he realized he had left his spellbook on his desk in Gorias, beside the lamp. His companions groaned. Cyril closed his eyes, pictured the book, its cracked green leather and the stain on the corner, and spoke the word. The book was in his hands at once, slightly warm from the lamp, a bookmark still between the pages where he had left it. His companions stared. He opened it and went back to reading as if nothing had happened.

The treasury of the Queen of Sheba had a door of solid bronze, and the court wizard had laid on it the one aura that thieves feared most. A wizard-thief from Tartessos, hired to rob it, walked up to the door at midnight and spoke the command to open. Nothing happened. He spoke it again, louder. Nothing. He cast Detect Magic and found nothing to account for it; the door was simply bronze. He was still standing in front of it, baffled and furious, when the Queen's guards arrived.

The jailers of the Citadel of Tok had gagged the wizard Morwenna, so she could not speak a spell. They had forgotten to bind her hands. When the chief jailer leaned down to leer at her through the bars, she clenched her left fist. He froze where he stood, stiff as a post, still leering. He strained, face reddening, and could not move at all. Morwenna reached through the bars, took the keys from his belt, unlocked the door, and walked out, her fist still clenched.

On the Isle of Demons, the Hantu came swarming out of the sulphur mist at the wizard Aurelian, a dozen of them, clawed, scaled, winged, no two alike. He waited until they were almost on him, then spoke the word. Most of the Hantu dropped dead where they stood, some mid-leap. Two of the lesser ones fought off the word and kept coming, and one great horned brute, older and stronger than Aurelian himself, never even felt it and strode forward. Aurelian drew his sword and backed toward the boats.

For a full week the wizard Esarhaddon had worked by lamplight, engraving the demon's true name around the belly of a brass lamp that had cost him a fortune. Now he faced the thing in the ruins of Melka Kontaurea and held up the lamp. The demon saw it and understood. It offered him a service: gold, secrets, the death of an enemy. He refused and spoke the spell. It fought, and fought again, and failed on the third attempt, and was sucked into the lamp with a shriek. He sealed it with his sigil.

The palace guards of Veddashud came through the doors of the Caliph's council chamber with drawn swords, and the wizard Arjun, who had been waiting for them, spread his arms. Every guard within the sphere around him faltered, then lowered his sword and looked to him for orders. He gave them. By morning they had arrested the vizier who sent them. By the following evening, one guard shook his head, blinked, and remembered who he was. Arjun had expected that. He had already arranged for the guards to be sent home.

The old wizard of Maninoa had waited forty years for this night. Inside his circle, with his inhuman servants kneeling in the shadows, he spoke the last and greatest of the evocations. The triangle filled with a sound like a great wind. Then there was a figure in it, robed like a scholar, with a voice like a chorus of trumpets: Paimon, the arch devil of spells, who can teach any spell in minutes. It regarded the wizard with calm curiosity. There was one spell the old man had hunted all his life. His hands were shaking. He began to bargain.

The wizard Aspasia sealed her vault beneath Gorias with no lock at all. She traced a single symbol in the air above the archway with the tip of her staff, an inverted triangle with a single line inside it, and watched it hang there, glowing faintly. Three nights later, a band of treasure hunters crept down the stairs with their lanterns and looked up. The first saw the symbol and screamed, dropped his lantern and ran in blind terror, straight past his friends and out into the night. Two of the others followed him.

The imp had served its summoner for twenty years, and now it served the wizard Lysippos, who wanted something more. He cornered it in a chalk circle in his workshop and spoke the spell, and the imp writhed, twisted, clawed at its own mouth, and at last hissed out a long name of broken syllables. Lysippos wrote it down with care. The imp looked at him with pure, eternal hatred. He knew perfectly well that it would try to kill him the first chance it had. He also knew that, with its name written in his book, he held its leash.

The Jotun raider had terrorized the Aesir of Gava for a winter, and the wizard Signe had learned his name from a captured thrall: Grimnar, son of Hild. She found him at the river ford, roaring, a great blue-skinned giant with an axe like a millwheel. She pointed at him and spoke his name and the word of exile together. He fought the spell with all his giant's will and lost. He vanished, axe and all, and reappeared somewhere in the far north, among the endless ice of the polar wastes, where he would be perfectly at home.