Practical adept book 17.., p.41
Practical Adept: Book 17 of the Spellmonger Series, page 41
“How the hell did you do that?” demanded Alperrik, his eyes wide and his mouth agape.
“Just take a little water, purify it, reduce the temperature with a frigorific transformation—” I began.
“No, no, not the ice! The . . . the whatever it is you did to make it appear!” he said, excitedly.
“Oh, my hoxter pocket,” I said, casually. “All the Castali magi are mad for them, right now. An interdimensional space in which non-living matter can be stored slightly out of phase with our physical reality. Mine is rated at forty pounds of mass,” I said, proudly, brandishing my staff. “Just one of the new enchantments coming out of Sevendor. It cost a pretty penny, but it’s useful,” I admitted. “Ice is heavy.”
“Useful? It’s bloody amazing!” Alperrik insisted. “An interdimensional space, you say? How does it work?”
“Oh, I don’t understand the thaumaturgical process behind it, save for some basic theory. I’m a bit of a thaumaturge, myself, but the spell requires a special artifact and a trained enchanter to cast. And irionite,” I added, apologetically.
“That is amazing,” the adept repeated, regarding the staff with new respect. “I heard you took a crack at the Fountain, too – and didn’t want to drown yourself in it afterwards. I think all of us have taken a pass at that monstrosity over the years. I didn’t think anyone could get it to work right.”
“My friend is extremely efficient,” Darriky bragged, proudly. “He even has magelights enchanted over his door. He throws around magic like rice at a wedding. He’s been working for weeks, now, and I haven’t heard a single complaint.”
“Then you must stop it!” Alperrik said, with mock alarm. “The last thing the rest of us need is honest competition! What will that do for our profession?”
That brought a chorus of laughter from the partygoers who were listening in.
“I’m just trying to make a living,” I assured him. “But I can’t help but be magnificent. It’s in my name,” I reminded him.
“So it is!” roared Alperrik, who had clearly had his fill of unchilled wine before we got here. “Where’s Amia? Wife! Wife! I know it’s your birthday, but you must meet my new friend Mirkandar! The Magnificent!” he called.
After that, I was somewhat accepted by the other magi in the room. Alperrik is the sort of mage who is self-important enough to set the social rules, I could see, and his provisional approval was as good as a royal commission. Don’t mistake me, they still treated me like a trained monkey – but a trained monkey who could speak Old High Perwynese.
I spent about two hours speaking and socializing with my more upscale professional peers, and I did my best to be charming without being obsequious. Indeed, it was refreshing for once to be at a party and not be the most important man in the room (or among them). Darriky accompanied me for much of that, and made a point to introduce me to several important adepts and their attendants. Some of them looked bored as hell, but I managed to engage the interests of several . . . including the portly little adept known as Jamanus.
“I know who you are!” he said accusingly, a scowl on his lips. “The new fellow in Bluestem. The one that ruined the ice business!”
“I didn’t ruin it, I expanded it,” I argued. “I increased supply and improved the market. Prices inevitably drop, in that sort of situation.”
“You dropped them in the fucking sewer!” Jamanus said, angrily. “I’ve been providing the ice for this side of town for years, and now you’re dumping it in Bluestem and Cooper’s, Porter’s, Mercer’s and even Porsago! For a fraction of what I charge! Why should people buy ice from me at a premium when they can send someone across the river to get it from you for a pittance?”
“Why, indeed?” Darriky asked, pointedly. “I suppose you should have considered that.”
“Ice is a work of craft,” Jamanus insisted, angrily. “It takes me an hour to produce a block. That’s my time, that’s my money. I’ve spent years building up my business, and I won’t have it taken away by some upstart footwizard from Castal!”
I looked at him sympathetically. “I haven’t even begun to expand beyond my side of the river,” I reminded him. “We’ve only got about eight carts delivering to the west side, now. There’s plenty of time for you to lock down your clients before we expand that far.”
“I sell a premium product!” Jamanus growled. “It’s a luxury item, and you’ve given it away to every fishmonger and butcher in town!”
“Perhaps you can tell your clients your ice is special,” Darriky said, tauntingly. “It’s really . . . really magical. Or cold. You can tell them your ice is colder,” he suggested, unhelpfully.
“Perhaps I can tell them that your ice is made with sewer water!” Jamanus barked in my face.
“There’s a block of it right over there,” I pointed out, keeping calm. “Everyone is free to examine it with their own spells. Pure water. Purified against debris, dirt, and malicious forces. You’d have to distill it, to find better.”
“We’ll see about that,” he said, his voice low and his expression angry as he stomped away.
“Don’t worry about him,” Darriky counselled, “he’s making plenty of money in his practice. He’s just sore he might actually have to work hard for a change.”
“Just wait until he hears I’ve got three more Icestones ordered, and that prices will be coming down, after Yule.”
“Really?” Darriky asked, surprised. “I thought you were bluffing with the eight carts, but—”
“We’ll have a dozen by then,” I assured him. “Business is good. Asalon the Fair got a contract to supply four different vendors in the Doge’s Market. Once the fleets realize that they can keep food fresh on ice while they’re at sea, I expect us to be selling every block we can make. And we can make a lot.”
“That really is brilliant,” Darriky conceded. “I wish I’d thought of it.”
As he escorted me to the next knot of colleagues, I did a doubletake. In the far corner of the hall I noticed a familiar figure, and one quite out of place in this refined venue: Durgan Jole.
To his credit he had put on a clean-ish jacket over his robe for the occasion, but he still wore his straw hat and sandals. His right eye was covered with a reasonably clean ribbon, and his left eye was bleary with drink. He had a cup in each hand and was speaking to a richly-dressed Unstaran.
“Do you know him?” I asked Darriky, suddenly, as I nodded in Jole’s direction.
“Osaba?” Darriky asked in surprise. “Sure, everyone knows Osaba. He’s a Wenshari mage who showed up a few years ago. Drinks like a fish. He lives out in the provinces, somewhere, and comes to town a couple times a month. Owns his own boat. He’s a mage, despite how he looks like.”
“Osaba?” I asked, confused.
“Oh, that’s just what everyone calls him. It’s Farise: no one asks what your name was, just what your name is. It’s less awkward, that way. Why, do you know him?”
“He just looked . . . interesting. Out of place,” I admitted.
“Oh, he is. One of Alperrik’s colorful guests. He’s a nice enough fellow, unless he gets too drunk. Then he passes out in a corner and no power on Callidore can wake him up. If you try too hard he can get surly. Other than that, he’s harmless.”
Harmless. Darriky had just referred to the most dangerous warmage I knew as harmless. Durgan Jole can defeat four other opponents with just a mageblade and a fearsome grin. Without irionite.
“What about the gentleman he’s speaking with?” I asked.
“That’s Ary, of House Marisika,” he explained, as we surveyed the buffet table. “Silk merchant. One of the few honest merchants I know – yes, I include our friend Asalon in that camp. Ary likes to associate with magi. A good adept can really perk up your stock, if he knows what he’s doing.”
“Silk?” I asked, surprised.
“There’s a whole suite of silk spells,” he informed me. “If you know them, you can improve the quality of the raw stock when it comes into port and double its price. It’s not a bad part of the trade, if you can do it regularly.”
“I never knew,” I admitted, as I snagged another coconut-encrusted prawn. The food at Farisian parties is always good, and less formal than a Remeran feast. A fresh group of partygoers was arriving, I noticed, as I chewed: a trio of young, splendidly-attired young men with a cocky bearing. They wore boots instead of slippers or sandals, and all three were wearing ceremonial-looking scimitars.
“And who are they?” I asked, at the risk of irritating Darriky. “More colorful guests?”
Darriky froze, for a moment, tensed and then relaxed. “You could say that. The two on the outside are local fellows, younger sons of a couple of important noble Houses.”
“And the one in the middle? With the headband?” I prompted.
“That’s Rellin Prat,” he revealed. “Orril’s nephew. The scion of the Mad Mage.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Pratt’s Jaffingay
Ours, of course, is an honest profession, but just as others have their means and methods of working with clients, an adept in practice can invent many and diverse fanciful terms and polite fictions to control the relationship. Across the duchies obscure words and complete fabrications of supposedly arcane constructs are regularly used by good honest magi when a client might desire something beyond his scope – or becomes an irritant to an adept. These should not be seen as fraud, though they do occasionally enrich the mage in his practice, but terms of art that every tradesman uses to contend with a belligerent or unreasonable client.
A Handbook For The Practicing Adept
Author Unknown
Rellin Pratt. I had heard about him for years, thanks to his run-in with my former apprentices at Inarion Academy where he was studying under an assumed name. He had tried to steal their witchstones while they were advancing their knowledge of the magical arts.
They had caught and exposed him, but there had been a murder and other intrigues at play and he escaped their wrath. From there, he had exploited his association with the Brotherhood of the Rat, a vile criminal organization, and taken to the seas as a pirate, using rebel Alshar as his haven. Somewhere along the line he had acquired a witchstone of his own.
Pratt was the son of the younger sister of the Mad Mage of Farise, according to the dossier supplied by the Garden Society. He had been raised amongst the Sea Knights of southern Castal, in the domain of Gyre, his father’s holding. But his Imperial heritage was strong in him, and despite his alliance with the Brotherhood of the Rat he saw himself as a Farisian patriot. When the opportunity arose to return to his adopted homeland, he took it – along with a fleet of corsairs. Half pirate-king and half pretender to the throne, Rellin had spent the last three years trying to solidify what power he had in Farise.
It was an impressive resume for one so young, I had to admit. He certainly looked the part, too: arrogant, cocky, expressive, aggressive and very self-conscious. The headband he wore was a sickly shade of yellow embroidered with a pattern associated with the old Doge of Farise, I noted. It wasn’t quite a crown, but it was certainly suggestive.
“That’s the young fellow who wants to be Doge?” I whispered to Darriky.
“Not if the Alshari have anything to say about it,” he replied in a low voice. “But he is favored by some of the old aristocracy, for reasons that escape me. They have to hold their nose to support him, but he’s their best hope at avoiding a continuance of the occupation. I think he’s here in part to shore up support amongst the magical community.”
We weren’t the only ones whispering, when Pratt arrived. Indeed, the entire hall broke out into murmurs, until a few brave souls began to clap. A ragged round of applause eventually convinced Pratt to give a stately bow to the crowd, followed by a wave and a politician’s smile. He immediately followed by greeting some of the more important members of the party, starting with the host.
“He seems to know his craft,” I observed, as he bowed, shook hands, and embraced a quick succession of the magical elite. He knew all of their names, their families, and their occupations, I noted, and managed to find some personal detail to bring up to each guest, as if to demonstrate that point. It was not dissimilar to how I treated my vassals and yeomen at court. Rellin was seeking enthusiastic support from these people, and wanted to be accepted as one of them.
His presence neatly sorted out those supporters from those more suspect of the would-be pirate-king. The latter tended to hug the periphery of the room, while the former formed a small knot around Pratt and his bodyguards. Even the arrival of the veiled dancing girls did not break up that crowd, and as they prepared to perform they had to wait patiently for them to clear the floor before they began. But eventually Pratt and his entourage gravitated toward one end of the hall, encouraging his detractors to find refuge in the other.
I have to commend our host on his choice of entertainment. Farisian dancers are well-known for their complicated and graceful performances, which could range from the sensually sublime to the undeniably energetic. Both male and female dancers perform with very little clothing, their skin lightly oiled, but because of some old custom they wore translucent veils over their lower faces as they danced. Their musicians were two drummers and an older woman who played an idiophone instrument called a zalaparta. A singer would punctuate the performance with stanzas of song, usually between the major acts of the dancers.
It was a mesmerizing performance. The dancing girls wove a seductive pattern and moved with almost perfect unison, their limbs waving gracefully. Their hips and shoulders swayed rhythmically, in alternating patterns of slow and fast movement.
The male dancers were far more energetic. Their naked chests glistened in the taperlight from the chandelier above as they picked up their female counterparts and whirled them through the air at each other, catching them smoothly. The girls moved from one position to another effortlessly.
It was a performance designed to both entertain and elicit an erotic response. There was nothing overtly suggestive about their movements, but there didn’t need to be. The young, strong bodies were displayed dramatically enough to impress us all. Not being able to see the dancers’ faces made it all the more alluring, I realized, as there was no way to see what the performers were feeling as they moved. Some might find that distracting, but once you got used to it, it was almost a relief to focus entirely on the physicality of the performance.
It was nothing like dancing in the Duchies. There, dances are participatory, not performances. They were divided into vigorous peasant brawls at festival time and sophisticated courtly pavanes designed to show off the fancy clothing of the rich. Wild gyrations were almost unheard of, and physical skill at dancing was not held at a premium.
When the drums finally beat into a tremendous crescendo of sound, filling the hall with artificial thunder, you could feel an excitement in the crowd of partygoers. And then it stopped, the dancers freezing into position at the climax.
“That was very nice!” I said to Darriky as I applauded with the rest of the crowd. “I’ve never seen anything like it!” I lied. In truth I had seen similar shows during my deployment, but not nearly as well-done as these dancers. Since I was focused on the half-naked girls back then, perhaps my attention to the finer details of the art was not truly engaged, I admit.
“It was good,” Darriky admitted, as he clapped along. “Alperrik fancies himself a traditionalist,” he explained, “and hiring traditional dancers is his way of standing against the Alshari occupiers. He thinks he’s being bold and rebellious.”
“So he’s a Restorationist?” I asked, hesitantly.
“Not as adamantly as some of the others, I think, but he wants the old order and back, in some form or fashion. I don’t think he much cares about the actual details, but he is staunchly anti-Narasi,” he clarified. “If Pratt is the only one who has a chance of doing that, he’s going to support him.”
After the dancers scattered to meet their various admirers, the original band began to play again, and the party settled down to pleasant socialization. I ventured away from Darriky for a while, taking advantage of what notoriety I had as the Ice Wizard, working in the shadow of Pratt’s entourage. And, as happens when a bunch of magi get together and have too much to drink, people began popping off harmless spells to show off their abilities and areas of expertise.
There’s no official term for this, but it happens in just about any gathering of magi, anywhere. Someone doesn’t like the illumination and manifests a magelight, or someone thinks the place needs more atmosphere, and so they conjure a mist that obscures the floor. Occasionally, some prankster does something a little more outrageous – usually to embarrass a friend or rival – and things escalate into a full-on competition.
Thankfully, the cantrips that started being tossed around the hall weren’t that disruptive. I think the mood was too tense, despite the relaxed appearance of the guests and the astonishing amount of brandy flowing. But at some point Rellin Pratt hauled out his witchstone and made a show of casting a magelight in the midst of the chandelier, raising the illumination of the hall greatly. The crowd applauded for him casting a spell any of my apprentices could manage as easily as a spark cantrip. And Pratt responded to the acclaim as if he had just created his own molopor.
I wasn’t the only one unimpressed with the pirate king’s spellcraft. A pair of adepts behind me at the buffet table started muttering disparaging things about Rellin Pratt and his pretensions.
“I can’t believe that upstart wants us to make him Doge!” one said in a snarled whisper. “He’s a half-breed, you know. They had to send his mother away to Castal after some scandal, back at the old court. He’s no more Farisian than the Ice Wizard!” he sneered, nodding toward me.
I perked up at that, and took a chance to interrupt. “I was just going to remark that he’s only half-Narasi,” I commented to the pair. “If that. The Sea Knights are just what the Castali call the old Sea Lord aristocracy in southwest Castal.”
