The spellbook ofSorcery

In a back room off the illicit market of Tartessos, a dealer lays out nine daggers on a blanket and swears that every one of them is enchanted. The sorcerer Quintus does not argue. He steps close, murmurs a formula he learned as a boy, and for a minute the space around him is laid bare to his eye: the flicker of a lamp, the dust, the grain of the wood. Eight of the blades are plain steel. The ninth hums with a thin, steady light. Quintus picks it up and asks the dealer, very politely, for his real price.

It is the rainy season on the coast of Oguanabara, and the jungle is one long wet roar of insects. The sorcerer Sextus walks through it perfectly dry, a faint shimmer of force a foot out from his skin. Mosquitoes bounce off it. Rain runs down it. When a hunter's arrow comes out of the trees it strikes him in the shoulder, but with far less force than it should. The only trouble comes at noon, when his guide offers him a gourd of water, and Sextus, parched, simply cannot take it.

The clerk of the Alchemists' and Sorcerers' Guild in Atlantis is bored, and bored men watch things that glitter. The sorcerer Philon flips a polished silver medallion over his knuckles, once, twice, catching the lamplight, until the clerk's eyes follow it and stay. A few words, quietly spoken. The clerk nods, blinks, and goes back to his ledgers without remembering any of it. Tomorrow, when the noon bell rings, he will get up, walk to the archive, unlatch the door, and walk away again, all without knowing why.

The cave in the Rhiphaen Mountains is black as a sealed jar, but the sorcerer Eyvind is seeing it anyway, in a strange world of glowing shapes. The cold stone is dark. The bats on the ceiling are tiny sparks. And there, crouched behind a boulder thirty paces ahead, is a hot, man-shaped glow, waiting. Eyvind taps his companion's arm and points. Then the fool behind them strikes a torch, and all at once the glowing world vanishes, and Eyvind is blinking into plain orange light like everyone else.

Mikon's rival in the charlatan trade has locked himself in his lodgings above the Roadside Market, behind a door of good Atlantean oak, and refuses to return the borrowed money. Mikon, who knows exactly one spell of any real use, raises his hand and hurls it. There is a loud thump, a puff of dust and a smell of scorched wood. The door shivers in its frame and stays exactly where it is. From behind it comes a voice suggesting that Mikon try knocking next time. Mikon, rubbing his hand, considers the window.

The rope bridge across the gorge in the Tarakan Mountains gives way with a sound like a whip crack, and four figures drop into empty air. The sorcerer Kiran, already safely on the far side, has seen this coming for some time; he calculated the load on the ropes the night before. He points, and points again, and again. His three companions and the pack mule slow as if falling through honey, and settle gently onto the riverbank below, the mule braying in outrage. Kiran begins the long climb down to join them.

The archers on the harbor watchtower at Ampator have the smugglers' boat in plain sight, and the first arrows are already slapping into the water. The sorcerer Nysa, crouched in the stern, flings out one hand toward the top of the tower. A sphere of perfect blackness blooms there, swallowing the archers, their bows and the lantern hanging above them. Arrows keep coming for a moment, wild and blind, whistling off into the sea. Then there is only shouting. The rowers put their backs into it, and the boat slides away into the night.

The old sorcerer Hermon has endured his rival's lecture at the Institute of Knowledge for forty minutes, and he has finally had enough. He folds his hands, says a few quiet words, and looks at the speaker. The rival pauses in mid-sentence, sways, grips the lectern and goes rather green. The hall begins to titter. He tries bravely to continue standing, staggers, and sits down very suddenly on the floor of the stage. Hermon rises, straightens his robe and offers to finish the lecture himself.

The crate of scrolls from the Tang University Complex needs to go up four flights of stairs to the sorcerer's study, and the porters have already refused twice. The sorcerer Qin Ren sighs, lays his palm on the lid, and says a few precise words about mass and attraction. The porters try again. To their astonishment the crate comes up off the floor as if half of it had been emptied, and they carry it up the stairs at a trot. Qin Ren follows behind, making notes on how long they have before it grows heavy again.

The thief who picked the sorcerer's pocket on the Bridges of the Inner City of Atlantis gets thirty steps before he hears a sharp word behind him. Ribbons of shimmering blue energy spiral through the air, wrap around his arms and legs, and pull tight. He falls flat on his face in the middle of the bridge, trussed like a festival goose. He writhes and swears, but the bands do not give an inch. The sorcerer Ariston walks up at a leisurely pace, retrieves his purse, and leaves him there for the watch.

The cisterns under Mehedra have been sealed for a century, and the sorcerer Phoebe intends to map them properly. She cups her hands, murmurs a few words, and a ball of soft white light swells between her palms until it is the size of a melon. It lights up the great vaulted chamber around her, pillars and water and all, as bright as early morning. She sets it on a ledge by the entrance to mark her way out, makes another, and wades on into the dark with the second one floating above her shoulder.

The basilisk in the Land of the Basilisks has turned half the expedition's porters into statues, and now it swings its terrible head toward the sorcerer Yaw. He is ready for it. He has already wrapped himself in an invisible aura, and he looks it straight in the eye. The deadly gaze strikes him and bounces back like light off a mirror. The basilisk jerks, stiffens and lets out a shriek like tearing metal, caught in its own glare. Yaw calmly takes notes. The survivors, huddled behind rocks, do not dare to look.

Stranded on a sandbar in the Isles of Ozar, the sorcerer Pelagia has watched three ships pass by without seeing them. When the fourth sail appears, she points at a green palm tree at the edge of the beach and speaks a single word. A small bright flame appears on the trunk, then the flame is the size of a shield, then it swallows the whole tree, and a thick column of white smoke rolls up into the sky. On the horizon, the ship begins to turn. Pelagia hopes the fire will burn out before it reaches the next tree.

The Cimmerian chieftain has chained the captured sorcerer to a post in his stockade, and he thinks the chain is very strong. The sorcerer Oddvar agrees that most of it is. He sits quietly through the evening, studying the iron links around his wrists with half-closed eyes, until he knows exactly which one of them was badly forged, where the metal is thin, and how much strain it will bear. Just after midnight, he braces his feet against the post, pulls at precisely the right angle, and the flawed link snaps.

The customs officers of Tharshesh are coming up the gangplank, and the merchant's strongbox of undeclared pearls is sitting in plain view on the deck. The sorcerer he has hired lays a hand on the box and speaks a few words, and the box vanishes, although the merchant can still feel it with his foot. The officers search the hold, the cabins and the rigging, and find nothing but rope and salt fish. They leave grumbling. The sorcerer holds out his palm, reminding the merchant that his fee was not to be declared either.

The enemy wizard on the deck of the Hesperian galley flings a fireball across the water, and it comes roaring straight at the sorcerer Galen. He does not dodge. He raises both hands and speaks a sharp, dry formula, and the fireball shudders, thins and comes apart in mid-air, most of it scattering into harmless sparks over the waves. What is left of it still reaches him, a hot gust that scorches his beard and blisters his hands. Galen swears. Next time, he decides, he will stand farther back.

The blue flower growing in the jungles of Pauk has never been described in any book the sorcerer Rana owns. She kneels a stride away from it and simply watches it for a full minute: the curl of the petals, the fine hairs on the leaves, the way the insects avoid it. Then the knowledge settles in her mind as neatly as a ledger entry. It is a sleep herb, very powerful, with a small magical virtue of its own. She wraps her hands in cloth before picking it, and begins to calculate what an alchemist will pay.

Six pirates in the harbor tavern at Joktan have decided to rob the lone sorcerer at the corner table. He smiles at them, and a gold coin begins to spin slowly between his fingers, flashing in the firelight. One after another their eyes slide to it and stay there. All but one, who blinks, shakes his head and backs out of the door in a hurry. The other five stand swaying. The sorcerer Amon tells them, quite pleasantly, that they are going to row him to Sheba, and they nod.

The sorcerer Zhang Ling has been told that an assassin will try for him in the East and West Markets of Tang today, so he walks through the crowds seeing everything at once, before him, behind him, above and on either side, all together. It makes him slightly sick. He sees the pickpocket behind him and the knife hidden in a sleeve to his left, and steps neatly aside. When the spell fades after ten minutes he is sorely tempted to cast it again, but he remembers the blind old sorcerer who taught him, and does not.

The inner wall of the Pyramid of the Atlantydes looks like solid stone, but the sorcerer Henuttawy is not interested in looks. She lays her hands flat against the blocks and lets the spell sink into them, measuring. The stone is barely a foot thick. Behind it there is empty air, a long passage running down and away for at least eighty feet. She marks the spot with chalk, then moves along the wall a few paces and sounds it again, mapping the hidden corridor section by section before anyone lifts a pick.

The little vial from a stall in the Sea Nymph Bazaar cost the young nobleman a month's allowance, and the stallholder swore it was the finest love potion in Atlantis. His friend, a sorcerer of some reputation, holds it up to the window, turns it once in his fingers and closes his eyes. A moment later he opens them and hands it back with a perfectly straight face. It is, he explains, a very ordinary purgative, of the kind given to constipated horses. The nobleman goes pale, then red, and marches back to the bazaar.

Night falls hard on the steppes of Scythia, with sleet on the wind and wolves howling close by. The sorcerer Darya plants her staff in the frozen ground and raises an invisible bubble over the camp, twenty feet across. The sleet slides off it. The wolves come, circle, and throw themselves at it, and bounce off one after another, snarling. Then a great brown bear shoulders its way out of the dark and leans its whole weight against the sphere. It bulges, and slowly gives. Darya reaches for her next spell.

The column of Tharshesh heavy infantry marches up the road to Tarxian in bright iron mail, spears leveled, and the sorcerer on the hillside above them smiles. He draws a square in the air over the middle of the road and gives it a positive charge. The soldiers who reach it lurch sideways, their spears ripping out of their hands, and are dragged into a clanking, cursing pile in the center of the road. Two of them resist the pull and stagger back. Several more start frantically unbuckling their armor.

The brawl in the Gilded Dragon has become a riot, and the sorcerer Demos, who only came in for supper, has had enough. He points at the middle of the room and speaks a single hard word. The explosion of sound is so loud it seems to have weight. Half the brawlers drop where they stand, stunned and twitching. The others stagger around clutching their ears, deaf to everything. Behind the bar, every other wine jug and glass bottle has burst. The innkeeper, deaf too, mouths something that is probably about the bill.

The creature picking its way through the copper hills of northern Ulloa is like nothing the expedition has seen: a bird-like thing whose feathers flash like beaten metal, pecking at the stones. The sorcerer Ixtli sits on a boulder and watches it closely for a full minute. Then she knows what kind of creature it is: shy, not aggressive, feeding on metal ore, and dangerous only when cornered. Something about its glowing wings nags at her, some ability she cannot quite grasp. She makes a note, and tells the men to leave it alone.

The silver necklace arrived at the merchant house in Tartessos with a letter of friendship from a rival family. The sorcerer they have hired to inspect it bends over the velvet box, his nose almost touching the silver, and studies it for a full minute. The enchantment he finds is exact and ugly: a slow curse of strangulation, strong enough to kill within the month, keyed to wake the first time the clasp is closed. He straightens up, wipes his hands on a cloth, and suggests politely that the family send it back.

The Alchemists' Guild of Acheron has an urgent order for a healing potion from the palace, and there is no time to brew it the usual way. The alchemist Nebet lays the ingredients out on the bench, the powdered root, the oil, the crushed blue beetles, and her partner, the sorcerer Rekhmire, passes his hands over them and murmurs a dense, careful formula. Nothing seems to happen. But when Nebet sets to work, the mixture takes and settles and clears in half the time it has ever taken before. The palace messenger does not wait long.

The smuggler captain in Saba has a secret compartment in his hold, and he knows the harbormaster's sorcerer will come aboard to search for magic. So he has hired a sorcerer of his own, who lays both hands on the hidden panel and wraps it in a quiet cloak. The next morning the harbormaster's sorcerer walks the whole length of the hold, frowning at everything, and finds nothing enchanted anywhere. He leaves. The smuggler relaxes. What neither of them knows is that a much better sorcerer is coming tomorrow.

The jailbreak from the prison at Tartuk begins with the sorcerer Hadria touching seven of her rebels on the shoulder, one after another, in a dark alley. Each of them fades away as she touches them, until the alley is empty except for her. Then she vanishes too. For the next hour or more the prison guards will insist that the gates opened by themselves, that the keys floated off their hooks, and that somebody unseen stepped heavily on the sergeant's foot. Nine prisoners are also missing.

The raiders have come ashore at the ferry landing on Llyn Llyon, six of them crowded together on the wooden jetty, laughing. The sorcerer Gethin, watching from the reeds, draws a square around them with one finger. Suddenly every one of them is floating, rising, arms windmilling, until they hang twenty feet up in the air above the jetty along with a lantern, a coil of rope and a very startled gull. Gethin considers his options for a moment. Then he lets them fall.

The bronze head of an ancient king, bought for a song at a stall in the Roadside Market, turns out to weigh as much as a well-fed child, and the sorcerer Aristeia has no intention of dragging it across Atlantis. She lays her hand on the cool bronze, pictures her workshop, the bench, the scrap of carpet by the window, and speaks the formula. The head vanishes with a soft pop of displaced air. When she gets home an hour later, it is sitting on the carpet, looking faintly annoyed.

The Horizon Trade Enterprise wants its warehouse in Atlantis joined to its new counting house in Gadirea, and it has paid the sorcerer Pytheas handsomely to do it. He spends a long, dull hour in the Atlantean warehouse drawing his lines of force, then takes ship and spends another hour in Gadirea, at the other end. When he is finished, the first porter steps nervously through the empty doorway and comes out in Gadirea, blinking. A minute later the next follows him, then the next, one at a time, each carrying an ordinary load.

In a foundry in Tharshesh, the sorcerer Belos and the alchemist Aras have been preparing the materials for a golem for weeks: river clay, iron filings, ground bone, strange salts. Tonight Belos walks slowly around the great heap, speaking the same long formula over and over, while Aras keeps the fires going. The clay begins to steam gently. The preparations, which Aras swore would take another month, will be ready in half the time. The finished golem is another matter, and the work still ahead of Aras is long.

The duel in the courtyard of the Society of Magical Arts and Sciences in Tang was supposed to be purely a matter of spells, and the sorcerer Guo Rui has prepared well. He surrounds himself with a faint gray haze, and his opponent's lightning splashes against it and fizzles away to nothing. So does the next spell, and the next. Guo Rui, unable to cast back through his own shield, waits smugly for his opponent to run out of magic. His opponent's large apprentice steps forward and punches him in the nose.

The Fomorian raider wading ashore on the coast of Haloga is twice the height of a man, and the sorcerer Brynja has one chance. She raises a clear quartz crystal to the sun and focuses a beam of white-hot light onto the giant's chest. It staggers, smoking, bellowing. She lifts the crystal again, but the sea spray has thickened into mist across the beach, and the second beam scatters into a harmless golden glow. The Fomorian keeps coming. Brynja picks up her skirts and runs for higher ground.

The sorcerer Tarquin's vault in Falias holds his life's work, and he has grown tired of thieves. So he sets an invisible gate on the vault door, where no one can see it. A month later, in the small hours, a masked figure creeps down the corridor, reaches for the lock, and is simply gone, sucked soundlessly out of the world. Tarquin, coming down in the morning, finds only a fallen lockpick on the floor. He picks it up, sighs, and goes to set the trap again.

The manticore swoops down on the camp in the Daraka Mountains, tail raised to strike, and the sorcerer Ngozi flings out her hand. A shimmering cage of force snaps into being around it, ten feet on every side. The creature slams against the walls, roaring, and hurls its spikes at the bars, which do not so much as tremble. It is trapped for the next hour. Ngozi watches it with scientific interest while her companions pack up camp, and they are several miles away by the time the cage fades.

The rival sorcerer grabs the stolen grimoire, laughs and teleports away from the steps of the Sorcerers' Guild of Acheron in a flash of violet light. The sorcerer Ptahmose does not waste a second. He runs to the spot where the man stood, kneels, and feels for the faint thread of power that still lingers in the air. It is fading fast. He speaks the formula and follows it, and a moment later he appears in a dusty study in some other city, right behind his rival, who is still busy congratulating himself.

The pirate captain on the deck of the corsair in the Sea of Baku is laughing at the sorcerer on the merchant ship across the water, confident in his mail and his crew. The sorcerer Lavinia points at him. A small dark cloud gathers directly above the captain and his officers and opens up in a hissing, stinking downpour. The officers scream as it burns them. The captain survives, inside his heavy mail, but his leather belt falls apart, his cloak dissolves, and the deck under his feet is smoking and blistering.

The prison hulk in Tharshesh harbor keeps its prisoners behind iron grilles below the waterline, and the sorcerer Octavia has been locked behind one for a month. Tonight she wraps both hands around the bars, speaks the formula, and feels the cold iron turn light and dry beneath her fingers. The grille is now bundled straw. She snaps it like kindling, steps through, and climbs past the sleeping guards to the deck. By the time the broken straw turns back into iron an hour later, she is swimming for the shore, and the guards have a strange puzzle on their hands.

The demonologist has fled the city through a rift into the Nether Realms, and the trail is still warm. The sorcerer Kalliope grips her two companions by the wrists, closes her eyes, and finds the ragged path he tore through the fabric of the world. Then she follows it, pulling them after her. The three of them tumble out onto a black shore under a red sky, choking on the sulphurous air. Far ahead, a small figure is running along the beach. He looks back, and they see him realize he is not alone.

The rival sorcerer has hidden himself inside a force sphere among the ruins of Valum Chivum, and he sits at its center drinking wine, protected from every arrow the bounty hunters can shoot at him. The sorcerer Marcellus arrives, surveys the scene, and hurls a single dark bolt that seems to swallow the light around it. When it strikes, the sphere dissolves with a sound like tearing silk. The rival drops his cup. The bounty hunters, grinning, reach for their arrows again.

The sorcerer Meton has been working all night in his study at the Alchemists' and Sorcerers' Guild in Atlantis, and at dawn he knocks his notebook into the brazier. Ten years of research flare up in an instant. Meton does not panic. He speaks the words, and to anyone watching he blinks out and back again. For him, however, the minutes run backwards, ash turning back into paper, smoke flowing back into the coals, until he reaches out and catches the notebook in mid-air. Then he is back, holding it, unscorched.

The sorcerer Leander built an invisible gate between his tower study in Atlantis and the hidden garden he keeps high in the Seidhr Mountains of Hyperborea, and for years it has been his private secret. This morning he steps through from the garden side as usual, with a basket of snow berries, and finds a goat standing in the middle of his study, calmly eating one of his books. Leander stares at it for a long time. Then he goes to fetch chalk, and begins to draw wards around both ends of the gate.